Cider and Doughnuts!!

This year, in addition to our normal variety of harvest, God blessed us with the opportunity to pick apples. For free!  A good friend of ours is the owner of a large mature apple orchard, and she offered to let us "adopt" her orchard.  So we did and have been there many times picking bushels and bushels of mouth watering fruits. 

Despite the fact that the trees need trimming in a bad way, they were loaded with apples and soon our garage began to fill with boxes of spherical fruit waiting to be processed in one way or another.  We soon came to acknowledge that we had way too many apples to just be made into apple sauce, and so we began a search for a cider press.  But, cider presses are expensive and though we looked here and searched there, we could not find anything near our price range. 

We were about to give up in despair, when once again God worked in a seemingly small way, and led us to look in the right place at the right time.  So now we are the very proud owners of a cider press.

Of course we couldn't keep all of this new found wealth to ourselves, so after a try to make sure that everything worked, we began to invite over families to help make and taste our new found product.

The Ostranders and Fultz from church came over one Friday afternoon and before they did we got everything ready for a delightful time.  Doughnuts were set to rise in the kitchen...

and a ferocious boy and a laughing mother cut up apples in the garage.

Everyone wanted to get a turn at the wheel, whirling it around as the apples were dropped in and chopped up.

In the kitchen, I set up a doughnut workshop and had some pretty adorable helpers rolling and cutting out the doughnuts.

Everyone wanted an apron so I passed out the ones with our names on them which provided lots of laughter and not a little confusion. 

Tiny and Sister took turns flipping the doughnuts or rolling them in powder sugar or cinnamon.

Mr. Blue eyes, (with powder sugar on his nose;) my faithful assistance in all things baking.

When all the hard work was accomplished, we gathered outside for our well earned tasty treat.

The perfect autumnal snack:  Doughnuts and Apple Cider!

Doughnuts came in three varieties.  Powder sugar, Cinnamon and Sugar, and plain.

Apple cider provides an excuse for wonderful times of fellowship and we mean to repeat it as much as possible in the coming weeks.

~Chs