Apple Picking, Foliage and DiCamillo Bakery

I know it's winter and you're wondering why I'm writing about apple picking and foliage but I'm playing a bit of catch up on the blog. Despite that there is currently snow on the ground, I am writing about this past fall. Living in the South my whole life where it's 90 degrees until November, I've never experienced fall for what it really is.

One of the best things about living in the Niagara Falls area is experiencing all four seasons, or so I've been told. I've been through two and half seasons thus far so we'll see how spring goes. If I'm thawed out by then, we'll call it a success.

This past fall I wanted to do all the "fall" things I had seen in movies and pictures. The first thing I did when the temperature cooled down was take my boys apple picking.

We picked way more apples than I thought we could ever eat, somehow we managed just fine, and I'm sure the boys got sick of getting apples in their lunch boxes everyday but the abundance of apples made me branch out. I made my first apple pie and my first batch of apple sauce. Both were quite good.

We went to Smith's Orchid located in Pendleton. They had Apple Cider Slushies and Cider Donuts available and they were perfection! The boys also had fun watching how apple cider was made.

When October arrived, the leaves started changing and all the colors I ever imagined lined each street. The foliage here is breathtaking. On Halloween, I spent more time taking pictures of the leaves than I did of my kids trick-or-treating.

The other wonderful thing I discovered this past fall was the ice cream sandwich at DiCamillo Bakery. Fall has nothing to do with an ice cream sandwich, it just happens to be the season in which I was introduced to this heavenly thing. If you live in the area then you no doubt know about DiCamillo Bakery. We get our bread fresh from there weekly. The doughnuts are amazing and they have the best broccoli pizza I've ever had. When my in-laws, who live in Niagara Falls, would visit us in Charleston, they would bring us a broccoli pizza in their suitcase.  Unconventional, yes, but it worked! I'm sure the other passengers on the plane were curious about the smell.

But in my opinion, even better than the bread and the pizza, are the ice cream sandwiches. The cookies, despite being frozen, are remarkably soft and they don't crumble or fall apart. The whole thing is heaven in your mouth. You must go out and try one.