I love a good Halloween recipe as much as anyone, and there are plenty of great recipe ideas out there that are both spooky and sweet – perfect for the holiday. But there are lots of behind-the-scenes tips that can help make your Halloween celebrations go a lot more smoothly and even add a bit of extra flair to your tricks and treats. Here is a list of helpful how-to’s that should really get the holiday prep off to a good start.
- If you’re going to try making Vampire Cupcakes or Slime-Filled Cupcakes this year, take a look at the how to make a filled cupcake tutorial, which will streamline the process and ensure that you have as much filling in there as possible to give the cupcakes a nice, juicy center.
- Caramel apples are another good seasonal treat. Starting out with the best apples for making caramel apples will make the treats perfect. Sweet-tart apples are usually the best choice. Pippins and Jonagolds are both well balanced. Opt for Granny Smith if you like them really tart.
- Chocolate-Covered Witch Hats are easy to make and make a great addition to edible Halloween displays. Use them to top off cupcakes, cakes or even just a simple scoop of ice cream.
- Carving pumpkins is one of the key elements of Halloween. Pumpkins can have a foodie aspect to them, as well as a frightening one, like this Creepy Cupcake Pumpkin, which features a skeleton hand clutching a glowing cupcake!
- After carving your pumpkin, put the seeds to good use and make some homemade toasted pumpkin seeds
- You can also make your own pumpkin puree for baking pies and cupcakes, but I would recommend using a sugar pumpkin or other small winter squash, as the larger carving pumpkins tend to be quite fibrous.
- If you want to go all out for the occasion, consider staging a Scary Halloween Dinner party. A little bit of gelatin, some creative naming and a good use of textures results in a menu that includes Chilled Brain Spread and Eyes in Blood Sauce. They look ghoulish, but taste great, and you get to play with your food while you prepare everything!
When I use toffee in a recipe, like Toffee Palmiers, I usually wait until I have some big pieces of toffee around and chop them up to use. This means that I use it more around the holidays, when toffee seems to be more widely available in stores. There is an alternative to waiting for big blocks of candy to chop up and that is to use Heath Bits o’ Brickle Toffee, which is packaged, chopped toffee make by Hershey’s. This toffee is very convenient and really tasty, with notes of caramel and almond to it. It’s the center portion of a Heath Bar, basically. They’re also very light and crisp, and stay that way during baking without turning into a hard mass of sugar that you can’t bite into.
The only downside is that they’re not kidding when they say “bits.” The pieces of toffee are very small, a bit larger than a sprinkle but much smaller than a chocolate chip. They mostly stay crisp during baking, but some of the smaller pieces will kind of melt into a cookie dough or cake batter, leaving you with the flavor and not the crunch. This isn’t a bad thing, but it is something to keep in mind if you’re looking to have larger, more noticeable chunks of toffee in a dessert. Otherwise, these taste great and can be found at most grocery stores, so they’re worth keeping around the pantry and are a great addition to an otherwise boring batch of chocolate chip cookies.
I suspect that vampires aren’t big breakfast-eaters. They’re probably more of the midnight snack type. This is precisely why I was inspired, as I was looking for a late-night snack during an evening of pre-Halloween scary movie watching, to make these vampire pancakes. These are buttermilk pancakes made with a red, raspberry jam filling that oozes out when you cut in for a bite.
The pancakes are quite easy to make. You start with a fairly standard pancake batter with a little bit of vanilla extract thrown in and pour some onto a preheated griddle. Next, you add a dollop of raspberry (or other red-colored) jam to the center of the pancake as it cooks. It’s a good idea to try and spread out the jam as you place it on the pancake, even putting several little dollops. At this stage, the pancake batter is too delicate to stand up to being spread with jam, and it’s really nice if the jam fills up as much of the pancake as possible. Top the jam with some more batter to cover it completely and cook as you would a regular pancake.
When the pancakes were fresh off the griddle and the jam was still warm, they were moist and tender, with a nice ooze to the filling. You can taste the vanilla and buttermilk in the pancakes alongside the jam. These pancakes were sweet enough that they didn’t need any additional syrup or toppings before serving, but whipped cream might be a nice touch if you want to serve a little on the side.
I used the same technique that I’ve used on my Vampire Cupcakes and Vampire Cookies to add bite marks to these pancakes before serving. I’m sure that any vampires out there would approve, even if they might prefer a different flavor of filling for their portion.
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Sometimes, you’ll look at a cake and just say “wow.” And I’m talking about the good kind of “wow,” not the kind that is uttered when perusing Cake Wrecks. I’m talking about the kinds of cakes that might make you stop in a bakery window and stare, and these are the kinds of cakes that The Whimsical Bakehouse: Fun-to-Make Cakes That Taste as Good as They Look! teaches you to put together, from basic single-layer cakes to towering three-layer creations.
The book starts out with the basics, so it is good for all levels of would-be cake decorators, there is no need to have extensive experience working with piped frostings and fondants before you get started. First, it goes through a list of all the tools that you’ll need, both edible and inedible, and describes how they should be used. Then, the book goes on to discuss coloring, so you’ll be able to get brightly-colored finished products, and cake assembly, so your layers will stack up neatly and be stable enough to decorate and transport.
After all this, the book gets into the recipes and the decorating techniques themselves. There are lots of recipes in the book, both for cakes, fillings and frostings. The instructions are very well-explained so, like the decorations on top of the cake, you also have a cake that tastes like it was designed by a professional. The decorations are the main focus of the book, however, and you will not be disappointed with the guidance given by the authors. They explain everything from the specific process used to make and work with the frostings/decorations, to the different types of dyes and food colorings that you might want to work with to achieve your desired result. There are lots of excellent photos in the book to inspire you and to help guide you through the cake-decorating process with confidence, too.
