Candy corn is a fall and Halloween staple, even though many people have a love-hate relationship with the candy. They’re quite pretty to look at, they make a great addition to a candy dish and my favorite brand (Brach’s) as nice notes of honey and vanilla to it. Brach’s actually sells enough candy corn (and the related Mallowcremes) each year that, if they were all laid end to end, they would circle the globe four times. On the other hand, candy corn’s over-the-top sweetness and slightly gritty, yet marshmallowy, texture means that these are not on the top of everyone’s Halloween candy list. I happen to be a candy corn fan when they come in small doses, and find them to be a good source of inspiration for some colorful desserts, including this Candy Corn Terrine.
This frozen dessert has no candy corn in it. It consists of white, orange and yellow layers of ice cream and sorbet that mimic the colors of a classic candy corn. I used a good quality vanilla bean ice cream for the white portion, a blend of orange sherbert and vanilla ice cream for the orange, and a mixture of mango gelato and lemon sorbet for the yellow layer. The different colors are layered in a loaf pan and then frozen. You can serve it in slices, or carve it into candy corn-shaped triangles to serve.
The vanilla bean ice cream was an obvious choice when I needed a white layer. The mango was a very dark yellow color (I used Ciao Bella gelato) and the lemon sorbet (Haagen Dazs) was almost white, so combining the two resulted in the perfect bright yellow. I mixed the softened ice creams in the food processor to blend them. The orange was a bit more problematic because my orange sherbert was a very pale color. I ended up blending it with some ice cream and adding a small amount of orange food coloring (I recommend a gel coloring) to get the bright orange I was looking for. You can use the same trick or look out for a dark orange sorbet when making yours.
Candy corn – Brach’s brand, anyway – is made with real honey, and in the past when I’ve made a candy corn-inspired recipe, such as Candy Corn Cookies, I’ve used honey to help capture that flavor. I did the same thing in this terrine, adding layers of honey in between the layers of ice cream. The honey isn’t a dominant flavor, but it oozes out between the layers when slicing and when you’re eating the terrine you get just enough honey to know it’s there.
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I’ve made molded chocolates before many times, filling up plastic or silicone molds with melted chocolate and letting them set. I don’t typically attempt anything too fancy, like you might see at a gourmet chocolate shop, although I can fill the chocolates with relative ease and consistency. When I spotted this Wilton Halloween Candy Kit on the Halloween shelf at a local store, I immediately liked the cute look of the candy molds, but was a bit skeptical of whether I actually wanted – or needed – a kit to make them when I could simply buy similar molds and work with those alone. I was swayed by the fact that I needed an activity to do with some very helpful taste-testing kids I know, and bought the kit to give it a try.
I was immediately impressed with the fact that the kit came with every single thing you need to make the chocolates. It included not only the plastic Halloween molds (3 sets of different designs), four different colors of chocolate candy melts (cocoa, vanilla white, vanilla orange, and vanilla green), piping bars, lollipop sticks, a decorating brush and a variety of treat bags with colorful twist ties for packing up the goodies. The convenience of having everything in one box is not something to underestimate when you’re undertaking a potentially very messy project.
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Fall holidays such as Halloween and Thanksgiving prompt the creation of all kinds of shaped baking pans. While there are all kinds of pans available during the rest of the year, the number of pumpkin and other fall themed pans reflects how closely we associate certain icons with the fall and that many of us do more entertaining – from small dinners to big parties, from just family to a big crowd of friends – than we do at other times of the year. I suspect that cakes baked in the Dimensions Mini Pumpkins Pan will be a hit wherever they’re served. This funky looking pan doesn’t waste any space on filler between the pumpkins, but instead looks like a pumpkin patch captured in heavy duty cast aluminum. The pan bakes eight half pumpkins for a total of four 3D miniature pumpkin cakes. You can use any cake flavor so long as you fill the cavities no more than two thirds full (to avoid having the cake overflow the molds during baking), though pumpkin cake seems like a natural choice for these. The pan gives them a well defined shape and even bakes the design of a stem surrounded by leaves on the “top” cakes.
After they have cooled the cakes can leveled with a sharp knife and can be sandwiched together with a small amount of icing or caramel sauce. Green icing could highlight the “leaves” on the pumpkins, or you can plate them as-is to create your own edible tabletop pumpkin patch.
Coffee and cookies is a combination that is just as good as milk and cookies, but slightly more adult. These Chocolate-Drizzled Espresso Chocolate Chip Cookies are a coffee-laced twist on classic chocolate chip cookies, made by adding a homemade espresso extract – instant espresso powder and water – to the cookie batter for a coffee flavor. The cookies are packed with dark chocolate chips and drizzled with dark chocolate to give them an elegant finished look on top of making them a great way to satisfy a chocolate craving.
The coffee kick in this otherwise fairly standard cookie dough comes from the homemade espresso extract I mentioned above. This mixture has an intense flavor and almost seems too strong when taken on its own, but when combined with the sweet, buttery cookie dough and the chocolate, it all balances out very well. The cookies are slightly chewy, with a good coffee flavor that just manages to not be overwhelmed by all the chocolate chips. The chocolate drizzle is optional, but is a nice touch that will set these apart from other cookies.
I like to work with instant espresso powder when I’m baking, because it lends a strong coffee flavor to cakes and other baked goods and is easy to incorporate, both as a powder or when reconstituted with a small amount of water. Instant espresso powder is definitely going to give you the best flavor in this recipe and it is available at many regular grocery stores. Specialty food and baking stores will stock intense coffee extract, which makes a good substitution for the instant espresso powder. After those two options, I would opt for a high quality instant coffee like Starbucks Via that will also impart strong coffee flavor over a regular instant coffee, though doubling the amount of traditional instant coffee will enhance the coffee flavor if that is what you have to work with.
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