It’s my time of year! Cool nights, sunny skies, autumn colors appearing - I’ll take it.

The last week of September Steve and I had a wonderful driving trip to Michigan’s upper peninsula. We made it all the way to Copper Harbor, the northern most town in Michigan at the end of the Keweenaw Peninsula. Our lodging for four nights was just outside the small town of L’Anse at the base of the Keweenaw and right on the “Big Lake” itself. Our first sunset was stunning!

After exploring and visiting various U.P. sites for a few days we headed west over to Wisconsin into Minnesota and down to Minneapolis to visit niece Rachel and family for a couple of nights. Then a brief one nighter in Lake-in-the-Hills IL to see Steve’s brother Greg and his wife Joyce before returning to Grand Rapids. Many miles traveled, many hours in the car and well worth it.

Here’s just one view of the rocky, rugged Lake Superior shore line along the Keweenaw.

While I’ve not posted much this past summer, I’ve recently been prepping for a few upcoming classes including one of my faves - croissants. After a number of months without laminated dough projects it feels great to go through the steps again and anticipate the end result.

Typically when I teach a croissant class, I plan to have baked croissants available to demonstrate making croissant aux amandes, a huge favorite.

A cool (and practical) thing to do when making laminated dough is to use the trimmings from the edges (I trim to neaten the dough layers while going through the process of folds and turns) and make “squiggle buns”. Using about 50 g of dough per “squiggle”, loosely place a tangle of dough scrap strips into muffin papers and let them rise an hour or so. Then (this time) I topped them with dots of butter, some chocolate pearls and a sprinkle of raw sugar.

Bake at 350ºF about 15-20 minutes until golden. Then drizzle caramel over the tops, pop ‘em back into the oven for a few minutes to set the caramel. Et voilà!

**A delicious dessert treat one evening**

One recent beautiful afternoon we popped over to Meijer Gardens to check out the bonsai show. Here are a couple of images of the entrance area all gussied up for autumn.