Halloween Treats and Death by Chocolate

As I mentioned in my last post, I made some Halloween treats last weekend, starting with white and dark chocolate covered Halloween pretzel rods.




These are so easy to make and they look so pretty. My favourite treats to make are the low-effort/high-impact kind. I melted the chocolate in the microwave in a bowl, and then I spooned the chocolate in the bowl over the pretzel rods while allowing the extra chocolate to drip off into the same bowl. Then I decorated the chocolate covered pretzels with a couple different types of Halloween coloured sprinkles. I plan on making a bunch of these for Christmas but they’ll have Christmas coloured sprinkles.

I also made some mint chocolate Nanaimo bars. Here is a picture of the pan before I cut them into squares.


The pattern in the chocolate topping  was created by adding the top melted chocolate layer of the nanaimo bar recipe and then piping alternating stripes of melted white chocolate, and melted green and orange molding wafers on top while the chocolate layer was still warm. Finally, I used the tip of a toothpick to draw lines from one side of the pan to the other, up and down, through the chocolate stripes before putting the bars in the fridge to harden.

And this is what the Nanaimo bars look like cut into squares alongside some of my other treats.


The recipe that I used for the Nanaimo Bars was adapted from a chocolate orange Nanaimo bar recipe, which I intend to try on an other occasion. The bars didn’t turn out quite right—the recipe for both the chocolate top and the filling were off—and so they look a little scrappy with their broken tops, rough edges and filling oozing out.

I need to find another Nanaimo bar recipe with slightly different proportions of ingredients in order to make the top layer and the filling the right consistencies, but the cookie crumb base of this recipe was absolutely perfect. I find that Nanaimo bars tend to have really dry bases but this one was dense enough to stand up to the filling but still a bit chewy, and toasting the walnuts beforehand really allowed their flavour to be distinct and to come through the rest of the crumb base. But even though the Nanaimo bars I made are a bit scrappy and sloppy looking in these photos, they were really delicious nonetheless. They were the kind of cookies that you can’t stop at just one or two. Good thing I brought them in to work for my coworkers.

I also made dark and white chocolate witch fingers, pretzel witch fingers, and chocolate pumpkins with peanuts. These were made with the help of two Wilton Halloween candy molds.


I still haven’t perfected using those Wilton candy molds, hence the air bubbles and the chocolate that looks as if it is overflowing the mold indentations around the finger nails. The witch finger mold is intended for pretzel rods but you can just fill the finger part of the mold with chocolate and omit the pretzel. The pumpkin mold is intended for lollipops, but I just filled the pumpkin cavity and didn’t insert a lollipop stick.

My next project is to make a cake and cupcakes to bring in to the office to celebrate the birthday of my coworker and I--our birthdays are one day apart in late November. Then I’ll be making a birthday cake for myself to enjoy at home, a Christmas cake and cupcakes for our office holiday party, and a Christmas cake for my favourite meal of the year, our family Christmas Eve supper.

Looks like I’m going to be busy! But being busy is good. It helps keep me out of trouble. Athough I don't imagine that there's much trouble I could get into given my relatively tame interests and hobbies, unless that trouble is some sort of cake or chocolate-covered confection related crime. Death by chocolate, perhaps?

Like cakes through the hourglass, so are the days of my life

I know that as you get older it's supposed to feel as if time is speeding up, but I can hardly believe that it's been over a month since I last posted here. This morning I spent about 15 minutes before I got out of bed just lying there groggily trying to figure out what day it was and if I was late for work even though it's Sunday. All the days seem to blend together, the passing of time marked only by the styles of the cakes that I make and plan to make.

In late June, I made a 6-inch birthday cake for my mom. It was a mixed berry cake with orange cream icing/filling and fondant decorations.







Last weekend, I made a 6-inch cake and mini cupcakes for my coworkers. They were chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream icing, and I used a couple different types of sprinkles, violet coloured sugar, and silver dragees for decoration. The lighting was poor when I took the following pictures, but you get the idea.











By the way, despite what the My Little Pony-esque colours and the precious wee cakes might suggest, my coworkers are not six-year-old girls. That didn't stop them from wolfing it all down, though.

I’m going to try to make a cake a month just to keep my icing and decorating skills fresh. You start to forget things after a while, which I discovered when I tried to make buttercream icing last weekend for the above cake and nearly messed up the order of the recipe. I picked up Wilton’s 2012 Yearbook yesterday at Bulk Barn and it’s given me some great inspiration for future cakes. Some of the cakes in the Yearbook look so fancy, fussy and time consuming that I'll have to modify and simplify things consideribly if I'm going to try and replicate any of them. My mother saw the Yearbook and told me that she wants the candy and ice cream themed cake on the cover for her next birthday but that's way out of my skill level at the moment. Good thing I have 11 months to practice.

I can’t believe August will be here tomorrow.  Late August to December is my favourite time of year, mainly because the anticipation of Halloween and Christmas--not to mention my birthday in late November--seem to infuse everything in life during those months with a bit of extra excitement. I woke up this morning and made a list of things I need to get to make Halloween cupcakes and cookies, and I picked out some Halloween cookie cutters to buy online (they're cheaper than in-store). I have a lot of my Christmas gift shopping done (yes, really), and I just ordered some different styles of How the Grinch Stole Christmas themed cotton fabric (this, this, and this) to make a Christmas tree skirt.  I need to get back to working on my Christmas decorations, too. My desk in my office/craft room is covered with little bird shaped pieces of felt that need to be decorated with tiny beads and assembled to make tree ornaments.

Finally, although this isn't making or baking related, my living room was repainted, as you can see from the painting-in-progress photo below that was taken on Friday.


I just wanted to document the big change from red to green! As much as I love my new Grinch-coloured living room, I miss the vibrant cherry red. After the tape was peeled off, I went around with a smaller brush and tried to cover up the bits of red still peeping through under the green around the baseboards and doorframes. Everywhere I looked there were hints of red, and just when I thought I’d covered over the last patch of red, I’d spot another one. You'd never know from looking at my living room now that it used to be painted red thanks to my obsessive touch-upping, which I can only liken to trying to find and clean away every last incriminating drop of blood at a crime scene. Not that I have any experience with that sort of thing. I'm just saying.

Harry Potter and the "dam" good cake

I've been busy but quiet the past few weeks since I last posted. I made the decision several months ago that I would read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books straight through after finishing my master’s degree, and so since the end of May I’ve been initiated into and wholly absorbed by a much loved world of wizards and owls and Hogwarts and chocolate frogs and an evil villain Who Must Not Be Named. After each book, I’ve rented the corresponding Harry Potter movie on iTunes and watched it. I’m on the last book, The Deathly Hallows, now. In total, it will have taken me five weeks to read all 3,400 plus pages of the series, but it has been worth it. I’ll definitely be ready for the final movie which comes out in July 15th, whatever “ready” means. I missed Pottermania the first time around when Rowling was still releasing the books but I’m glad I decided to read the works from start to finish all in one go, especially now that Pottermore has been announced. I didn't understand the phenomenon before reading the books but I totally get now why children and adults alike are so in love with these stories and characters.

I do have a couple of bakey updates, though. I made two cakes last week. The first one was a summer inspired vanilla and raspberry cream filled cake that I made for a work function.







All of the flowers and bees are made from Wilton white fondant, which I tinted and formed myself. The silvery shimmer on the daisies and bees’ wings is Wilton’s white Pearl Dust. I love that stuff. I also love the edible ink pen that I used to doodle on the bees’ faces and stripes.

The second cake is the one that I made for my Dad for Father’s Day. It’s only a small 6-inch round vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream and it features a family of three fondant beavers relaxing outside their pretzel-covered dam and enjoying the longed-for summer weather, which we haven't had in St. John's yet this year.









The beavers, fish and flowers are all handmade from Wilton white fondant, which I tinted and formed into the figures. I made some dirt rubble for the river bank by whizzing toffee chips and milk chocolate chips together in my mini food processor, and the water is blue-tinted piping gel. The trees are store-bought rice krispie treats molded into cone shapes and covered in green buttercream icing. The beaver dam is a mound of chocolate buttercream mixed with cake crumbs that was molded in a plastic wrap lined small round bowl (I put it in the fridge then for a while to let it get firm enough to hold its shape), turned upside down onto the cake, and finally covered with broken pretzel “logs” to resemble a beaver dam. I used chocolate rocks to decorate around the bottom border of the cake.

I dreamt last night that I entered a Wilton contest only ten minutes before it closed. Then I was at some event or other, a conference of sorts although I can't remember what the theme was, and my mother called to tell me that I had won $25,000 from Wilton for best something-or-other. I can't remember what that something-or-other was, although I assume it was cake related. Seeing as how I’ve probably spent about $25,000 in my waking life on Wilton products since I’ve started this whole cake decorating knack I’ve been on these past few months, I figure I'm due for a bit of a payback. $25,000 is a big exaggeration, of course, but starting any new craft or hobby can be expensive when you're first buying all the new tools and decorating products. The upside is that I'll have my tools forever and can make many, many cakes long into the future with them. The downside is trying to come up with an idea that's as good as or better than my goofy beaver dam cake! But I've never shied away from a good challenge.