Archive for October, 2009
Pumpkin isn’t the only vegetable that becomes a popular inclusion in desserts and baked goods during the fall. Sweet potato is also very popular. And for good reason, since sweet potatoes have a naturally sweet flavor and a beautiful color to them. They also take to other flavors very well because the sweet potato itself is quite mild. Sweet potato pie is a classic, but sweet potato can be used in other desserts, as well. These oatmeal chocolate chip cookies have some mashed (cooked) swet potato incorporated into them, giving them a bit of extra sweetness and a hint of orangey, fall warmth.
The cookies are fairly standard, as far as oatmeal chocolate chip cookies go. Adding some sweet potato to them makes the cookies very moist and tender. They start out fairly chewy, but will become slightly more cake-like (although still moist) after a couple of days. The biggest change in these from a plainer cookie is the spicing. Some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies rely only on cinnamon, while these use cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg. The cardamom in particularly seems to go very well with the sweet potato.
I used regular semisweet chocolate chips and toasted pecans in these. I think they’d be very good with milk chocolate and with walnuts, as well. I think that dark chocolate might take away a bit from the natural flavor of the sweet potato, but will still work if that’s what you prefer to use.
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Last year, I decided to try to incorporate food into one of my Halloween jack-o-lanterns in addition to the usual array of scary, smiling pumpkin faces. It worked out well and I came up with a creepy skeleton hand holding a cupcake. This year, I wanted to try my (non-skeleton) hand at incorporating food into my pumpkin carving again. I considered trying to go with a slice of pumpkin pie, or some other pumpkin dessert, but ultimately decided that the cupcake would be an ongoing theme. This year’s pumpkin is called “I vant a cupcake.”
It was inspired by my Vampire Cupcakes, showing a fanged pumpkin face about to dive into a moist, cherry pie-filled cupcake and ready to suck up the filling. This is one of my first attempts to sculpt a design into a pumpkin without actually cutting straight through the pumpkin itself. I used a zester that had a large opening for making twists (to garnish drinks) to carve away the outer rind in the area I wanted to put the cupcake, then used regular pumpkin carving tools to cut away the rest. I free-handed the whole design, so I can’t share a template, but one tip that will help you is to thin the pumpkin wall from the inside. A thinner wall will not only be easier to carve, but it will let more light through if you decide to try and sculpt your design.
I’m including a detail of the cupcake below, if you want to take a closer look at how I carved it out. I tried to make the outlines and lines of the wrapper deeper and brighter, while keeping the frosting more rounded and billowy. +Continue Reading
One of the first food-related, creepy Halloween things that I learned to make was a big ice hand to float in a bowl of punch. You make this by filling up a latex (rubber or similar) glove with water, tying it off like a water balloon and freezing it, then peeling the glove away when you’re ready to use the ice hand. It looks neat floating in a bowl of punch, especially if you have some dry ice in there, too. The only drawback is that the ice hand is big and clunky, and not ideal if you’re going to be serving anything other than punch at a party. So, this year, I picked up some Bone Chillers, a silicone Skull and Bones ice cube tray.
I really like the shapes and the tray is just as easy to use as a hard plastic tray, since you simply peel back the tray to release the ice cubes. Even better is that this tray can double as a mold for other things, like candies, fudge, truffles, marshmallows or anything else that you might want to make into a little skull and bones shape. The only downside is that the tray makes just eight ice cubes at a time. I started two days ago, emptying and filling the tray again – not continuously, just when I had the chance – and now my icebox is full of cute and slightly menacing Halloween ice cubes!
I found these on sale at a local store and have seen them all over the place, even at bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, so keep an eye out to pick some up (probably at a good price) before Halloween.
While pumpkins fit perfectly into Halloween just as they are, jack o’ lanterns have an even more perfect fit because Halloween is really the only holiday where the carved pumpkins are showcased. There are lots of pumpkin-shaped baking pans, like the Pumpkin Patch Pan and the Mini Pumpkin Cheesecake Pan, but there aren’t a whole lot of pans that incorporate the jack o’ lantern face into the design, leaving you to rely on frosting to achieve a spooky look. Fortunately, there are a couple of great looking pans that have pumpkin faces molded right in, so all you need to do is bake and serve.
The pan pictured above is the John Wright Pumpkin Muffin Pan. It’s a cast-iron pan that has distinctly cut shapes and bakes six large muffins. It also works well for cornbread, especially if you like the “crust” that cornbread can get when it cooks in cast iron. Wilton makes two Jack o’ Lantern pans. The first is a Petite Jack-O-Lantern Pan, an aluminum pan that bakes bite-sized pumpkins and can be used for cookies or mini cakes. The second is the Pumpkin Faces Pan, which is made of silicone for easy removal of the muffins or cakes when they’re done, preserving their scary smiles without worrying about your treats sticking to the pan.
As much as I like brownies, I would have to say that I always have a soft spot in my heart and a place in my kitchen for blondies. They tend to be more cookie-like and less chocolaty than brownies, but since they’re not defined by their cocoa content, there are even more ways to deviate from the standard and experiment with different flavors and ingredients in a batch of these bar cookies.
This particular batch of blondies get their flavor from maple syrup and coconut. It’s a pairing that you might not immediately come to mind when you think about either of the ingredients on their own, but they work together surprisngly well. Maple syrup is used as a sweetener for these blondies, along with some sugar, and gives the bars a rich, deep sweetness. It also helps keep the bars nice and moist. I would recommend using Grade B maple syrup, since it has a deeper and more distinct flavor than Grade A, but the lighter type will work fine, as well. The coconut supplies its own soft floral and nutty flavors to the bars, and really ensures that the bars keep a nice chew to them even if you end up storing them for a few days.
The finished blondies have a great texture, both moist and chewy, and a great flavor to them. At first, you can really taste the maple syrup, but as the blondies sit for a day or two, the coconut flavor steps up and shares the spotlight. For a simple bar cookie that takes only a few minutes to mix up, there is a lot of flavor here! I really like these plain, but they’re also good with chopped nuts or white chocolate mixed in, too.
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