Cinnamon

andrear@herald-mail.com CHERRY RUN, W.Va. - The 30th annual Apple Butter Festival in Berkeley Springs will be held this weekend - and the festival's reigning apple butter champions are ready. Members of the Pleasant View Community Center in Cherry Run recently prepared about 200 gallons of apple butter in anticipation of the festival on Saturday, Oct. 11, and Sunday, Oct. 12. Center members, their families and friends spent a recent Friday peeling, coring and quartering 80 bushels of Golden Delicious apples into the snits - prepared apple pieces - that they boiled and spiced with about 500 pounds of sugar and cinnamon and cloves into their prize-winning apple butter the next day. Veteran apple butter maker Leila Stuckey and other members of the now-defunct Hemlock Homemaker's Club in Morgan County helped launch the festival 30 years ago - and created by trial, error and plenty of tasting the apple butter recipe that's reigned supreme many years since.

Fresh pears are great for fall eating, especially if you appreciate a healthy snack or meal accompaniment. You can find pears in most markets or grocery stores. When shopping for fresh pears, Bartlett, Bosc, Comice and Anjou are the varieties found most often. When selecting pears, choose firm fruit, as the color of a pear does not represent how ripe it is. Bartlett pears turn from green to yellow when they are ripe. Some varieties of pears that are red in color will turn from dark to bright red. Still other varieties might not change color at all when they ripen.

martinsburg@herald-mail.com Joni Mason carefully braided thin rolls of dough and placed them around the crust of her apple pie. She cut a simple pattern in the top, put aluminum foil around the edges and slid the pie into one of the ovens at Musselman High School. Maybe she's a perfectionist. She wasn't happy with the crust and when the oven started smoking from filling that had overflowed, it was the final straw. "It didn't turn out that good," said Mason, 17, a senior.

BOONSBORO - Place Pauline Reeder's 62-year-old apple dumpling recipe on the list of things that get better with age. Reeder, 80, of Boonsboro, cooks up dozens of them at a time and sells them for $2 a pop. It's a recipe she discovered in a 1945 cookbook and, according to her daughter Charlene Jones, has since been tweaked to "perfection. " (A Herald-Mail editor said after eating a dumpling purchased from Reeder: "That might be the best apple dumpling I've ever had. ") "She makes the best apple dumplings in Washington County," Jones said.

1 loaf (16 ounces) of thinly sliced white bread, crusts removed 8 ounces cream cheese, softened 1 egg yolk 3/4 cup confectioners' sugar 1 cup sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon 3/4 cup butter or margarine, melted Flatten bread with a rolling pin. In a medium mixing bowl, combine cream cheese, egg yolk and confectioners' sugar. In another bowl, combine sugar and cinnamon. Spread about 1 tablespoon (or more to taste) of the cream cheese mixture on each slice of bread.

1/2 cup chopped nuts or raisins, to taste 1 to 1 1/2 bags frozen rolls 1 small box vanilla pudding, not instant 1 cup brown sugar 2 tablespoons milk 1/2 cup melted butter 1 teaspoon cinnamon or to taste Spray a 9-by-13-inch pan with vegetable spray. Layer bottom of pan with nuts or raisins. Place frozen rolls on top of first layer. Mix vanilla pudding, sugar, milk, butter and cinnamon and pour over layer of rolls. Let the bread sit out all night to thaw and rise.

The secret to Dorothy Martin's fluffy cinnamon rolls lies in a doughnut. Instead of making the cinnamon roll dough from scratch, Martin, 69, of Hagerstown, subs in doughnut mix she gets at Martin's Farm Market just north of Hagerstown, near Maugans Avenue. "I decided one day I was going to try something different," said Martin. "So I tried rolling them out instead of putting them into doughnuts. I spread them with butter, put my sugar and cinnamon on and it worked out. " The result is a fluffy but filling batch of cinnamon rolls that taste like they came from the baker's and not your home kitchen.

Mark Anthony's cooking career has run through some pretty high-profile terrain. He was named executive chef at the Las Vegas Sands resort complex when he was only 24 years old. He appears on national TV. He has catered or served as personal chef for rock bands, politicians and sports heroes. But Anthony got his start in cooking in another sort of high-profile terrain: Mount Rushmore. "I think I was 12 when I started cooking. That was in a restaurant in Keystone, right next to Mt. Rushmore (in South Dakota)

I am a changed man. A more open-minded man. Fifteen months ago, I had a conversion experience. Just before the big Halloween snow in 2011, my wife, Yolanda, told me she was going to eat a gluten-free, grain-free diet for 30 days. When I heard these words, I kept my face placid, but inside, my food-loving heart of hearts was doing an imitation of "The Scream. " You see, we generally eat as a family, and when two of the kids went vegetarian, we all ate vegetarian, by and large. That was OK - food was still flavorful.

This Christmas, everyone's paying more attention to the bottom line. Whether it's gifts for family or slashing the budget for decorations, anywhere a penny can be pinched is a gift in itself. And so is finding the time to spend a little quality time with your family without breaking the bank. Making salt dough ornaments and cinnamon ornaments not only brings time to actually sit down beside your kids and talk, but it can also bring a lasting memory. What's so wonderful about the craft is that it's inexpensive.