Office Potluck - Pumpkin Tea Sandwiches

When I was a kid, I thought it would be so great to finish school and become an adult, because adults don't have homework. Once I became an adult and got a job, I realized that this wasn't true at all. Adults do have homework for their jobs, and one of the big assignments is making things for office potlucks. In school and at work, everyone has a good idea of who will throw together some junk the morning it's due (potato battery, mini-mart donuts), who will labor for many hours in order to outdo everybody else (life-size covered wagon, handmade chocolates), and who will do something crazy (interpretive dance about Abe Lincoln, barbecue sauce on yellow cake). Let's try to navigate these dangerous waters and make something delicious and attractive.

Pro Tip: Get on the sign-up sheet early so you can pick what you want to make instead of racking your brain trying to think of something that wasn't already taken.

My office is having an event tomorrow morning, and we're supposed to bring things with a Halloween or Autumn theme.

My mind went to pumpkins, because I love anything with pumpkin in it, so I signed up to bring pumpkin bread. I later decided to jazz it up a bit and turn it into little tea sandwiches with cranberry filling, because cranberries also signify Autumn to me. I didn't want to spend forever on it because the event is in the middle of the week, so the whole thing is pretty easy and you could use different flavors for your bread and/or filling to suit your taste.


Pumpkin Tea Sandwiches

1. Make or buy a loaf of pumpkin bread. This may be surprising, but the one time I use a mix is for pumpkin bread. Making it from scratch is nice, so go ahead and do so if you'd like to and you have the time, but I find the texture isn't as good for slicing into little sandwiches. It's up to you.

2. If you baked the bread yourself, start early and make sure that you let it cool all the way before you slice it, because otherwise you will have a disaster. Breads need that cooling time to develop their interior texture, or "crumb."

3. While your bread is cooling, make your filling. All you have to do is combine cranberry jelly/jam/sauce and cream cheese or strained yogurt. I bought good quality cranberry sauce that had little fruit pieces and mixed it with strained Greek yogurt. I used about a cup of each, but taste it and see what seems like a good mixture to you. It will be easier to mix them if you let the ingredients come to room temperature first.

4. Slice up your bread. I cut off the sides and then the top, leaving a brick shape. Cut it in half length-wise, set each half on its side, and slice it to the size you want your sandwiches to be. (Hint: Make them thinner than you'd think.) I cut each half into thirds and each third into four slices, but later made the sandwiches more petite by cutting them in half.

5. Spread filling on half the slices and then top with the remaining slices. If you end up with an uneven number of slices, you can sometimes carve a few out of the top you cut off. I used kind of a lot of filling because it's just non-fat yogurt and jam, but it's up to you.

6. Pack up the sandwiches for transport. I like to save the more durable take-out containers from restaurants for things like this. I just put my sandwiches in those and I'll carry them to work in a bag tomorrow morning.

7. The best part is that you get to eat scrapwiches when you're done!