Happy Halloween, everyone!

I hope you’re all done with your Halloween baking and are ready to sit back, carve a pumpkin and eat some candy this evening. My pumpkin this year had a definite baking theme: a skeletal arm holding up a cupcake. It was fairly easy to carve using a fine-blade pumpkin knife (one of the really, really thin ones). There are two tricks to making the design come through clearly. The first is to thin the wall of the pumpkin by scraping it from the inside when you’re hollowing it out. A thinner wall is easier to cut through. The second is to cut off the excess pumpkin from behind the design once the design is in place. Making each of the holes less “deep” lets more light through in the end and makes your design much clearer.

If you want to try your had at carving this pumpkin, I made up a template for it that should fit against most medium-large pumpkins (anything where the carving space is about 8-in by 8-in. Draw it onto your pumpkin with a red sharpie (it won’t show up when the lights are out and the pumpkin is lit) and cut out the pieces marked in yellow on the template. Don’t forget to toast your pumpkin seeds for a little Halloween snack, too!

Desserts are the best part of a Halloween party for me- after all, it’s a holiday that is essentially based around sugar, isn’t it? Aside from the desserts, I usually stick with “real” foods and make burgers or something else that is easy to cook and serve, especially if there is a crowd. I do like to add to the atmosphere by putting a chunk of dry ice into a bowl of punch, but it’s possible to really go all out for the holiday and make a whole spooky supper, in addition to serving spooky sweets.

This Cannibal-themed Halloween Supper is easily the creepiest and the most creative Halloween food array I’ve ever seen, and it included appetizers and drinks, a main course and dessert. Appetizers included “chilled brain spread” and “peppered people pate,” both of which were fairly ordinary chip dips dressed up with some simple sculpting and the addition of fake eyes and teeth (which gave the impression that the pate was ” the result of something that fell into a meat grinder). The mains included edible gelatin “Eyes in Blood Sauce”, a “Brain on a Pate” made from sculpted mashed potatoes and a really well presented “Roasted Long Pig” - a pork roast served from inside a fake skeleton’s rib cage! Dessert of a “Chilled, Bloody Heart,” that oozed blood all over the place when it was sliced into (much like my vampire cupcakes, only much messier) is the finishing dish for this particular menu. It’s not a dinner for the faint of heart - but then again, if you’re not feeling a bit faint of heart around Halloween, perhaps you’re just not letting things get scary enough!

A mixer is a crucial tool to have in the kitchen, especially if you do a lot of baking. They are so efficient at whipping egg whites and mixing dough that the it’s almost crazy to try to do everything strictly by hand (or with a whisk) all the time. A hand mixer is a great tool - not too expensive and it gets the job done. But just as the hand mixer is an improvement over mixing by hand, a stand mixer can really be an improvement over a hand mixer. Good stand mixers can be expensive, however, with lots of models costing well in excess of $200 or $300 dollars. Fortunately, there are also quite a few in the under $200 range and recently Cook’s Illustrated put these less expensive mixers to the test to see which could compete with the top models and save at-home cooks some money.

The average home cook doesn’t need a massive professional stand mixer, even assuming that he or she has room in the kitchen for one on the counter, because most home cooking doesn’t happen in restaurant quantities. CI chose the following criteria to rate the mixers on:  3.5 to 4.6 quart bowl size, user-friendliness, and the ability to successfully mix/knead pizza dough without struggling, as well as the abilities to whip cream, cream butter and mix a batch of thick, chunky cookie dough. The mixer brands in the test included KitchenAid, Sunbeam, Hamilton Beach and EuroPro.

It turned out that the dough kneading ability of the mixers is what set the top models apart from the rest. All of the mixers could handle cream and cookie dough easily. Machines with one beating arm, as opposed to two (the style that has a hand mixer mounted on the side of a bowl), kneaded bread as well as the pro models, though not in as-big batches. The two arm mixers, like the Sunbeams, never got up enough kneading power to being the dough together into a smooth, elastic mass.

The top rated mixer was the Kitchenaid Classic Plus Stand Mixer, which was powerful enough for just about all kitchen tasks (as compared to the pro models) and easy to use, and the Bosch Compact Kitchen Machine and Hamilton Beach Eclectrics Stand Mixer came in a close second. All three can be found for under $200, and if you keep your eyes out for sales and aren’t too picky about the color of the model you want, you can find an even better deal than that.

Alice Medrich’s recipe for cocoa fudge cookies is one of my favorite chocolate cookie recipes. Not only are they delicious, but the cookies are also quite low in fat. The secret ingredient in these cookies is yogurt, which adds moisture and tenderness to the cookies without adding in a lot of extra butter or oil. These pumpkin spice fudge cookies are little more than a riff off of the original recipe, only they use pumpkin puree instead of the yogurt originally called for.

The substitution is an easy one-to-one using canned pumpkin because it actually has a similar consistency to the Greek yogurt that I normally use in baking. It should be the same for most brands, although if you find that your pumpkin is unusually thick or dry (or if you’re using leftover roasted pumpkin and pureeing it yourself), you can whisk a tablespoon or so of water into the pumpkin to juice it up.

You can’t taste any of the pumpkin itself in the finished cookies because it is just too mild compared to the strong chocolate flavor of the cocoa powder. This isn’t a bad thing, but to give a little hint of the pumpkin’s presence in the dough I also decided to mix in some of my homemade pumpkin pie spice. The spiciness works very well with the chocolate and adds a little something extra to push these chewy, fudgy cookies over the top.

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• Cacao nibs have gone from a relatively unknown ingredient to something that is regularly stocked on store shelves in the baking aisle over the last year or two. The same can be said of specialty flours, like spelt and buckwheat. Fresh from the Oven used two of these once-uncommon ingredients in a delicious looking batch of Nibby Buckwheat Cookies. The cacao nibs add some chocolate flavor and a nice crunch, while the buckwheat flour contributes an extra tender-crumbly texture and a slightly nutty whole grain flavor.
• Huckleberries are not easy to come by unless you live somewhere the berries grow natively, like the Pacific Northwest. If you can get your hands on some, The Pie Lady’s Huckleberry Creme Brulee is an excellent application for them. The vanilla and bay leaf-infused custard is a great backdrop for the sweet berries. If you don’t have huckleberries available, try this recipe with blueberries, fresh or frozen. Small and sweet wild berries are your best bet.
• What could be simpler than chocolate milk? Nothing, if you make it by stirring store-bought syrup or powder into a glass of milk. The Pioneer Woman Cooks takes chocolate milk to a whole new level by making Decadent Chocolate Milk with homemade chocolate syrup. The syrup must be made in advance, so you can’t get quite the instant satisfaction of a mix, but once you have it it will keep in the fridge for two weeks and will be ready to go at a moment’s notice.
• The Savory and Sweet Autumn Leaf Pies at Not Martha are one of the most creative fall treats I’ve seen in a while, since most treats around this time of year tend to be geared specifically towards a major fall holiday, like Thanksgiving or Christmas. The pie crust is regular pie dough that has been shaped with leaf cookie cutters. Not Martha filled some with a cinnamon sugar mixture for sweet pies and with a mixture of cooked fall veggies for a savory pie. A whole wheat pie crust would be a good choice for these, though you’ll have to double the recipe if you’re planning on serving more than two or three pies.
• Genesis of a Cook put together a sweet Pineapple Bundt Cake. The cake has a bright, sunny flavor and is satisfyingly moist. Since pineapple is most often featured in upside down cakes, it’s really nice to see the fruit used in a different way and incorporated into the body of the cake rather than just sitting on top (or on the bottom, depending on which stage of making and upside down cake you evaluate fruit placement).
• Cooler weather in fall often leads to a desire for a little extra spice to keep warm. Enlightened Cooking has a recipe for Moist, Dark Gingerbread that sounds like the perfect treat for a chilly evening, loaded with spices and sweetened with molasses and brown sugar. Better still, the cake is actually relatively low in fat and is made with whole wheat pastry flour, so it’s a treat you don’t have to feel guilty about eating. If you’re a big gingerbread fan in general, you might want to try it with a cup of Trader Joe’s new Gingerbread Coffee, too.

Acorns are not plentiful in my neck of the woods. There is a walnut tree near my year, so around this time of year I notice an upsurge in the number of squirrels attempting to bury things in my yard, however. I picture this pan as being a kind of  homage to nut-gathering animals everywhere. The Acorn Cakelet Pan makes 18 mini muffin-sized cakes shaped like acorns, with tops, stems and all. The detail put into these pans is impressive, and its nice to see that they included design beyond the simple shape of the nut. The pan can be used with any recipe you might ordinarily use to make muffins or cupcakes, so it works well for both savory cornbread and sweet cakes. If you can find it, try substituting a small amount of acorn flour for part of the all purpose flour in a favorite muffin recipe, since a recipe that uses the nuts would capture both the look and the spirit of the pan.