Pumpkin and Pizza With Your Love

When the nights are getting colder, and the pumpkin patches start appearing around town, it is the perfect opportunity to plan a autumn date to enjoy with your partner. This date is a way to switch up your date nights from the typical dinner out. Filled with plans in the afternoon going into the evening, you will not be bored and will make many memories in the process. Here is how we planned out our pumpkin patch and pizza night date.

Pumpkin Patch

We found our local family owned pumpkin patch in Arizona (MacDonalds Ranch) and thought we would go check it out. The minute we walked in, there was a homey feel to the ranch. There was cowboy western-style architecture that resembled downtown Cave Creek. There were many picture opportunities, set up with hay-bales, pumpkins, scarecrows and cute signs. There was horseback riding, train rides, and a feeding zoo. There was also fun games to play and a hay-bale maze that was kid friendly. Dakota ate a hot dog for a snack, and said the hotdog was grilled and a perfect quick bite. We enjoyed our time there and talking to the staff hearing about how they are a family owned ranch. We spent lots of time choosing our perfect pumpkins, as we planned to have a carving competition later in the evening. We were extra picky, looking for the most round pumpkins with pretty stems. We bought a mini pumpkin as well since they had giant bins of them for only $2. The family business made this patch more welcoming, and we would do this date again in years to come.

S’mores Dip

When we got back, we were super hungry for a snack, so we decided to have dessert before dinner. It was still too early to prepare dinner, so we decided we could not wait until later to eat our sweet dip. We preheated the oven, made our s’mores dip, and snacked on it while we talked about our time at the patch. The chocolate was really hot, so I would recommend giving it a minute before digging in, if you decide to make this. The skillet I used to make this is linked here.

Ingredients:

– 1 cup of chocolate chips (these will melt, I would recommend making sure you get melting chocolate)

– 6 marshmallows

– 3-5 graham crackers

1. preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit

2. Place chocolate at bottom of skillet. Bake for 4 minutes, and add one minute at a time mixing in between until chocolate is melted. Careful to not burn yourself, the skillet will be hot!

3. Top with marshmallows. Place back into oven for 4-6 minutes. Until the marshmallows puff up and have a slight brown color

4. Dip your graham crackers in the dip and enjoy!

Time to Get Comfy

At this point, we wanted to get cozy after being at the patch all day. We each got all clean, then I got us matching pajamas for the evening. We each wore black t- shirts, and orange pajama pants. These were fun as it made us feel festive for the night, cozy and made the night feel more eventful and memorable to the date. We made sure to get pictures of us together for our photo album in our matching pajamas.

Mimosas and Sunset

It was time to make our drinks! Around this time, the sun was going down, and we wanted to enjoy watching it. We poured ourselves apple cider mimosas, and sat outside together with our drinks and watched the sun set. Here is our mimosa recipe:

Ingredients:

  • apple cider
  • champagne
  • sugar
  • cinnamon
  • agave
  1. Dip the rim of mimosa glass into some agave. Then dip it into a tbsp of a blend of sugar and cinnamon. This will create a cinnamon sugar rim.
  2. Fill glass with 70% champagne and 30% apple cider

Pizza Making

We enjoyed making our pizza together as an activity. We got the dough, pizza sauce, and mozzarella from Trader Joes. We got a few extra toppings that we each wanted to make our pizzas personalized. Then I bought some small cookie cutters that we used to shape our mozzarella into halloween shapes. We thought this was so fun as we got to each be creative with decorating our pizzas and playing with our toppings. We baked our pizzas for the time directed on the dough package, and loved sharing them together for our dinner!

Pumpkin Carving

This was our favorite part of the entire date. We got the ambiance all set up with turning on Halloweentown to watch, getting our drinks ready and table set for the activity. We placed a cheap halloween tablecloth on the table, so that it made clean up easier after the activity. We used newspapers to put our pumpkin seeds on, so we could discard all the seeds quickly off the table before carving. We had our pumpkin carving set, and this made it easier to carve our pumpkins, having every tool we would possibly need. Then we faced away from each-other. We drew out our plans for our pumpkins at this point. We gave each-other only 5 minutes to look online for inspiration, but 5 minutes only. Then we had to put our phones away and carve. At the end, we revealed our pumpkins to each other and put fake candles in them. We had a little competition of who did better, but the results were inconclusive. Our pumpkins were too different to compare, but both loved each others pumpkins.