Archive for: halloween
Monster Cookies are the perfect cookie to make when you can’t decide what flavor you’re in the mood for. These cookies offer three flavors in one: peanut butter, chocolate chip and spicy dark chocolate. All three doughs work well together, but have distinctive enough appearances and flavors that they make for an unusually good – and unusually good looking – cookie.
The vanilla chocolate chip dough is a pretty normal chocolate chip cookie dough that is loaded with chocolate chips. The peanut butter dough calls for crunchy peanut butter and a handful of salted peanuts to be added. I like to add some peanut butter chips to drive home the peanut butter flavor even more. The dark chocolate cookie dough has chopped dark chocolate in the dough and actually has cayenne pepper in it, which gives it a spicy finish. It’s not too spicy, but it does have some heat to it that makes it really stand out from the other flavors in these monster cookies.
The cookies are crisp on the outside and chewy in the center, just as you would want a chocolate chip cookie to be, even though these are anything but your standard cookie.
I like these cookies for Halloween because when you make them the way I did here, with the dark chocolate cookie dough in the center, the cookies turn out looking like giant monster eyes! Of course, you can assemble the three cookie doughs in any in any order you want, but I do recommend keeping them all separate (as opposed to swirling them together) so that you can get the full flavor of each cookie dough. I scoop up the doughs on a large spoon, one after another. For even easier assembly, form small balls of each dough separately and press them together before placing them on the baking sheet.
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One of my favorite Halloween traditions is carving pumpkins into jack o’lanterns and I always carve at least a few every year. The spooky faces of carved pumpkins don’t always translate well into baked goods like cookies, because it is very difficult to carve out the eyes, nose and mouth of a cookie-sized jack o’ lantern unless you have a very sharp, small knife and a lot of patience. This Jack-O-Lantern Cookie Cutter Set, which I spotted at a recent trip to Williams Sonoma, makes jack o’lantern cookies as easy as putting together a Mr Potato Head. The set starts out with a heavy duty pumpkin-shaped cookie cutter and comes with a number of tiny additional cutters that make pumpkin eye, nose and mouth shapes. It’s fun to put together the different combinations and much easier than the hand “carved” method.
The only trick to using a detailed cookie cutter set like this one is that you need to use a cookie dough that won’t spread – or won’t spread very much – to preserve the neat cutouts on the pumpkin faces. Store bought sugar cookie dough (a favorite with kids doing holiday baking projects) will spread too much and won’t produce good results. A relatively stiff homemade butter cookie dough with a minimum of leavening agents (or none) is typically the best choice, like my Best Butter Cookie Dough. To dress it up to match your Halloween cookie cutters, mix a little black and orange food coloring into the dough and you’ll have very authentic looking Jack o’Lantern cookies.
Halloween is the perfect time of year to get creative with baked goods. You can pretty much go all out with colors and unusual decorations – after all, when else would you see Zombie Cookie Cutters and a Witch Finger Shortbread Pan? This year, Wilton has come out with a spooky new design that will make a great addition to any Halloween bakeware collection. Their Bone Cookie Pan bakes five bone-shaped bar cookies at a time. The pan is nonstick and the well defined bones are so smooth that they should release easily once baked. The bones are all about 6 inches long and about half an inch thick after baking. Since you’ll probably have to bake in batches to accommodate a large batch of cookie dough, it is also worth noting that the pan will cool down quickly, so you don’t have to wait too long to refill it once you’ve popped out an already baked batch of bones.
Any kind of cookie dough will work in this pan, whether you like chocolate chip, sugar cookies, shortbread or even brownies. You will probably have to bake a test batch to get the right baking time for your recipe once you start baking in these unusual molds. The bones can be served as-is or you can enrobe them in chocolate. You can even use some ganache or buttercream as glue to stick two half bones together to make one 3D bone for your Halloween table.
And when Halloween is over? You can always use this pan to make some pretty sharp looking dog biscuits that any puppy would be happy to eat.
I’m always inspired to bring a foodie element into my Halloween pumpkin carving and my pumpkins this year were no exception. My first creation was a Skeleton Chef, a skull with a little chef’s hat on top. I wish I had had a slightly larger pumpkin to give me a little more room for the hat, but the finished effect was still both cute and creepy.
My second pumpkin was a big black widow spider, but instead of a red hour glass on the spider, I added in a sculpted cupcake. When I say that I sculpted the cupcake, I mean that I carved it into the pumpkin without going all the way through the rind. I used the same technique last year with my I Vant A Cupcake pumpkin, where I also gave a more detailed description of how the cupcake was created. For this Cupcake Spider pumpkin, I carved out the cupcake design first so that my work surface would be as stable as possible, then I carved out the spider around it. Be sure to get your cupcake as thin as possible so that you can see the detail when you light up the jack o’lantern!
I didn’t make templates for these two shapes because I free-handed the designs. Since I was able to do this, that means that they’re pretty straightforward designs with just a few simple lines. Sketch your shapes onto a pumpkin with a pen before taking a knife. And when carving outlines, remember that you can always make a shape wider by trimming the edges, but you can’t put pumpkin back once you’ve carved it away.
Perhaps it is a little over-the-top to call these brownies “Boneyard Brownies,” but, since we are getting close to Halloween, I think that adding a little bit of drama to what is otherwise a good – if undramatic – dessert is just fine. I turned this batch of brownies into boneyard brownies by topping them with dark chocolate frosting and lots of Scary Bones Sprinkles!
The brownies are my standard brownie recipe. They have a great texture that is dense, tender and just fudgy enough to make them seem very rich and satisfying. This is in part due to the fact that there is no leavening in this brownie recipe, so don’t be alarmed when you see that there is no baking powder or baking soda included on the ingredient list! Once the brownies were baked and cooled, I frosted them and added the decorations. The frosting is a very small batch of chocolate frosting, made with dark chocolate and cocoa powder. It’s a good match for the brownies in terms of flavor and texture. If you prefer to use milk or semisweet chocolate, you can substitute them into the frosting recipe, although the finished frosting might be slightly lighter in color.
You could omit the decorative bones if you’re making these for any other occasion, of course, but if you’re making these for Halloween I highly recommend looking for some bone-shaped sprinkles at a store near you. If you can’t find them, use any other Halloween sprinkles that you like, or use a bit of white frosting to pipe on some bones, instead! However you serve them, these are a great treat for chocolate lovers – even those who already have a bag full of Halloween candy.
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