Bites from other Blogs

There are so many great Halloween ideas out on the blogs this week that it almost makes me wish we had another week before Halloween so that I would have time to try more of them. Even if you don’t end up making them this year, these desserts are well worth looking at and bookmarking for future holiday inspiration!

• The Spooky Spider Web Cupcakes that Jessica Gavin baked for Halloween offer an easy way to decorate cupcakes with fondant. The cupcakes are devil’s food cupcakes topped with a chocolate spice frosting. They would be good any time of the year, but the fondant spiders and spiderweb decorations that top the cupcakes make these perfect for Halloween parties. You can use the same decorations with other flavors of cupcake, too.
• I am Baker made a sweet and scary Monster Cake with Monster Cookies. The layer cake is sandwiched together with a rainbow of frosting and topped off with lots of little cookie monsters. The secret to these cookies is in the decorating, where you can have a lot of fun with different colors of icing to bring the cookie characters to life. You can go as bright or as dark as you want, but be sure to keep white icing on hand to pipe in all those little monster teeth and give them some bite!
• Simply Delicious‘ Poison Toffee Apples look good enough to tempt any trick or treater. The glossy toffee coating these apples is a deep black color, thanks to a little bit of food coloring, that gives them a monstrous – and beautiful – look. They have that classic sweet caramel flavor, so you won’t end up like Snow White after eating one of these. Tart apples will provide the greatest flavor contrast between the apple and the toffee, but you can use any apple that you like to eat.
• The Butternut Squash Cake with Salted Caramel Sauce from Knead for Food is a dessert that could be served at any occasion during the fall and winter. The cake uses butternut squash instead of pumpkin, for a slightly lighter color and flavor. It’s spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and drizzled with a homemade caramel sauce to serve it. The cake is simple and light, so you don’t need a special occasion to serve it.
• I posted a Homemade Pumpkin Spice Latte recipe at Brewed Daily. This recipe uses a homemade pumpkin spice syrup which is infused with cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg. The syrup does not contain any dairy, so you can use it to make regular or vegan versions of this fall favorite at home. You can also use the syrup to flavor coffee and tea.