Gingerbread houses may have some competition this year for edible Christmas decorations. Williams Sonoma has just released a new, limited edition Snowy Village Cakelet Pan for the season. The pan bakes up six small cakes in the shapes of show-covered fairytale homes. The cast-iron pan is made by NordicWare (as are just about all of Williams Sonoma’s special edition pans), so it’s a heavy-weight pan. It also has a nonstick finish to help preserve some of the details of the cakes when you release them onto a cooling rack before baking.

Most cakes are going to look cute on a cake stand, these cakes can actually become part of your decor. You can set them out at the beginning of the evening during a holiday event and leave them out to be admired before serving. They don’t need much decoration, but a dusting of powdered sugar will give them some “snow” and a few dots of colored icing and you’ll have a string of Christmas lights going around the entire village!

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.

Platefuls of Halloween baked goods and buckets of Halloween candy aren’t the only things that you can keep around the kitchen as you get into the spirit of Halloween. Something like a Bloody Evidence Chef’s Knife is both a scary, funny and useful prop that you can add to the knife rack. The knife is a real chef’s knife with fired-on blood spatter that will not come off during washing or use, and is completely food safe. Imagine coming out of the kitchen with a big pie to slice up in one hand and this knife in the other! I would think that it would also make a fun gift for fans of the Showtime TV show, Dexter.

Miniature cheesecakes are a great way introduce both portion control and cuteness into dessert. You can always bake them in a muffin pan, but this Mini Pumpkin Cheesecake Pan gives you a few advantages that regular muffin pan doesn’t. You don’t need any paper liners for these pans because the bottoms are removable. All you need to do is loosen the sides of the cheesecake and push up on the bottom of each cavity, and the mini cheesecake will slide right out. The sides of the pan are nonstick, too, which really makes this easy to use.. Also, the cavities are pumpkin-shaped, making them perfect for fall and winter cheesecakes, even if they’re not pumpkin flavored.

As it so happens, I have one of these lovely Chicago Metallic Mini Pumpkin Cheesecake Pans to give away this week, and since my cookbook will be shipping in just a few days, I’m going to include a FREE copy of the cookbook along with the pan, making this a giveaway extra special. Now, there are no mini pumpkin cheesecake recipes in the book, but the pan comes with a good basic pumpkin cheesecake recipe to get you started with your pan.

To win, just leave a comment telling me what you favorite cheesecake flavor is on this post by Friday, October 23rd . A winner will be selected randomly. Don’t forget to include your e-mail on the form where you leave a comment (not in the comment itself) so I can contact you if you’re the winner!

Update: This Contest is now closed!

Shaped pans mean that you don’t need to spend a lot of time decorating your baked goods, since they already come out in a holiday-ready shape. This is certainly true of Wilton’s Mini Pumpkin and Ghost Pan which  bakes up a half-dozen mini-muffin sized pumpkin and ghost shapes for Halloween. The pan itself is nonstick and, though both the pumpkin and ghost have some facial details on the pan, the details on the pan aren’t so precise that they make it difficult to remove the spooky treats when it’s time to take them out of the oven.

Putting the shape aside, you can use this pan just as you would use any other mini muffin pan, filling it with a recipe for miniature muffins, Chocolate Espresso Cups or even a cake mix and baking them up as you would if the shapes were simply round. You can leave the cakes/cookies/muffins plain or make up a batch of frosting to ensure they’re trick-or-treat ready. The only downside is that, since the pan only bakes six at a time, you’ll need to do several batches to use up all your batter. Fortunately, the pan cools down very quickly (so you can fill it up and send it into the oven with minimal down time) and the vast majority of batters can stand to sit around on the counter already mixed and be baked off in batches without any ill effects to what you’re baking.

Some people - lucky people - can really pinpoint that exact moment when they became interested in cooking or baking. I don’t have that exact sort of “ah ha” moment to recall, although I do have lots of enjoyable memories about food and cooking in general. I remember baking Christmas cookies with my mom and watching my grandfather make apple crisp, as well as watching some relatives head out to farmers markets to buy dinner and listening to others order takeout.

There is one thing that stands out from the pack slightly, and that is of my first kitchen gadget. It was my own tool and I used it whenever I could: a plastic eggbeater. I’m pretty sure this was intended to be a toy, but it certainly worked well enough to scramble an egg or two for breakfast.  The beaters are very narrow, so I don’t know that I would try it to whip egg whites or anything, but I still have it and it still works. I don’t use it, but I keep it around because it reminds me of those first exciting days of making my own food in the kitchen.

I can’t say that the eggbeater inspired me to start baking. That said, perhaps it was somehow indicative of the fact that I’d just keep upgrading eggbeaters until I ended up with a big Viking mixer in my kitchen!