Snapshots- Halloween Treats

Snapshots –Halloween Treats

This post is something new I’ve decided to do, basically it’s just a random collection of pictures of bakes I’ve done at some point. These posts probably won’t happen very often but when I do post them I’ll try and keep all the images related to a particular theme, so to get the ball rolling on this new series let’s start with some Halloween bakes!

This post will be a bit short as I generally don’t do much Halloween themed baking since I don’t really bother with it, so most of these bakes are actually for parties that I was forced to attend.

In preparation for my review of the book “A Zombie Ate my Cupcake” I decided to try out one of the tutorials in it. As I’ve been keen to try making meringue frosting I decided to give the Ghost Cupcakes a whirl. These little guys were the result! The recipe was such fun to make, even if the meringue was really sticky! After I took this picture the icing I used for the faces melted a little in the heat of the kitchen, so the sad looking one on the top right now looks like it’s crying! Poor little guy! It wasn't until later that I noticed one of the spider biscuits had lost an eye, poor critter looks like he's had a terrible accident.

The following cakes were baked with my friends as our contribution to the catering of a Halloween party out housemates were throwing.

This was a yoghurt cake covered in water icing and an albino spider, designed to look like a gravestone. The cake turned out to be a bit more crumbly than we expected but I thought that looked good as it make the gravestone look weathered and old.

And now a selection of cupcakes, these ones were chocolate orange flavour. I mostly like the colour of the icing on these.

A selection of albino spiders...

And finally our “radiation” cakes, I honestly can’t remember what flavour cakes these were, probably chocolate. The design was loosely based on the hazard symbol for radiation and was created using the same chocolate dots used on the spiders.

Oh and because I had so much fun making them here is another picture of my Halloween fondant fancies.

That’s all for now I’m afraid; I really don’t do much Halloween themed baking the next snapshots should hopefully be much longer!

Halloween Decorating Tutorial – Spiders and cobwebs

Expanding on last week’s post on quick and easy decorating ideas here is a quick tutorial on how to make simple spiders and cobwebs on cupcakes and biscuits. Both of these tutorials are really easy to do; they literally take minutes and don’t require any fancy equipment so they are great for kids to try. I also happen to find them rather adorable!

IngredientsFor the spiders you will need:
Chocolate buttons or large circular sweets
Eyes, I like to use coloured chocolate dots but blobs of icing or chocolate chips work equally well.
Prefilled icing tube, the sort you find in the supermarket baking aisle.
Cakes or biscuits to put them on

For the cobwebs you will need:
A prefilled icing tube
Cakes or biscuits to put them on

SpidersTo make the spider, take one sweet/chocolate button and attach the eyes. As I use chocolate dots for this I put a blob of icing on the dot and then stick it onto the sweet. Then place a blob of icing onto the cake or biscuit where you want the spider to be and stick the sweet down, finally using the icing tube draw 8 legs from the sweet down onto the cake, simple as that. I then like to add an extra blob of icing on top of the eye to create a pupil, I think it makes them look much more friendly!

For these spiders I used Galaxy Minstrels and black icing

These work best if you match the icing colour to the chocolate/sweet so use black icing with milk chocolate, white with white chocolate .etc

Last year me and my friends used white chocolate which resulted in albino spiders! 

Cobwebs
The cobwebs are equally simple; however I forgot to take a picture of them so please enjoy my awful MS Paint diagrams! All you need for these is a surface to apply icing to (cake or biscuit) and an icing tube.

To start draw a 6 point line star on the top (honestly I have no idea what to call this shape!), bonus points if the lines are straight and all the same length!

Then around the centre draw a series of small lines, this should connect all the longer lines and make a circular-ish shape. Again bonus points for getting the lines all the same length!

Continue drawing lines in this manner until you use up all the available space, I try and leave a little of the long lines poking out but that is just a matter of personal preference.

For an extra spooky effect why not add one of the candy spiders once you’ve finished?
Or how about this idea, follow the pattern above as normal but draw it onto greaseproof paper or baking parchment using melted chocolate or royal icing. Leave to dry, then peel off the paper and hey presto you have a spiderweb. These look great sticking out of a pile of frosting on top of a cupcake, or make lots in different sizes and glue them onto a large cake.

So there we go; two tutorials for simple Halloween cake decorating. And considering its half term here in the UK it’s a perfect way to keep children amused!
(I hope these instructions make sense, I have apparently lost my ability to type English today!)

Quick and easy Halloween Cupcakes

Halloween presents a great opportunity for specially decorated cupcakes for parties or just for fun. Themed cupcake decorations can be as easy or as complicated as you like depending on your level of skill, so in this post I’ve detailed a few quick and easy ideas for spooky treats. Some of which I will be posting tutorials for in the next couple of days. All of these ideas are great for children to try.

Keeping it simple
If you don’t have much time to decorate cakes the quickest way to just to make a simple water icing and throw some sprinkles at them. Cakes decorated in this way can easily be matched to an event or theme by matching the sprinkles and the icing colour to the event. So for Halloween try making icing in some spooky and unusual colours, bright green or black for example.  Orange and black strands are a popular choice for sprinkles but I really like using little bats and ghosts.  Oh and a touch of edible glitter is always fun! Another easy way to make creepy cakes is to colour the cake mixture, normally when I do this I make pink cakes but for Halloween why not try green or blue?

Also don’t forget, even the simplest cake can be made to match a theme by using special cake cases, shops are full of Halloween inspired designs right now so shop around to find your favourite!

Vampire blood cakes
These are also very simple but can look pretty cool. Simply cover any flavour of cake (Red Velvet works a treat) with white icing or buttercream, then make a really runny red icing and dribble it over.  

Ghosts
These are taken from the book “A Zombie Ate My Cupcake” and are very effective (book review coming soon). Starting with whatever cake flavour you prefer make an Italian or Swiss meringue then put a small blob of meringue on each cake, top with a marshmallow then spoon more meringue on top. Use the back of a spoon to shape it into a ghost shape, let it cool then add facial features with an icing pen.

Gravestones
Again start with any flavour cake you want and a batch of chocolate biscuits. Try and make your biscuits gravestone shaped, rectangles and crosses also work well (at this time of year it’s fairly easy to find biscuit cutters in these shapes). Use a piping bag or an icing pen to write messages onto the biscuits, the classic RIP always works well! To assemble the cakes cover them with green buttercream (not to bright, try and make a grassy green) and stick a biscuit into the top of each.
Optional extra: to suggest a fresh grave dust coco powder or chocolate biscuit crumbs (Oreo cookies crushed in a food processor are perfect for this) in front of each biscuit and add a few icing flowers.

Spider websCover any flavour of cake with black buttercream or water icing, then using either an icing pen or piping bag; ice a spider web pattern onto each cake. Add a touch of white edible glitter because why not?

So there you have it a few quick and easy decorating ideas for Halloween cakes, stay tuned for some in depth decorating tutorials for a couple of these and some other simple designs.  If you have any other ideas for simple cake designs I’d love to hear them!

Halloween Petit Fours: Fondant Fancies

I love petit fours, they are so delicate and pretty, and since they have just been featured on The Great British Bake Off (signature challenge, semi finals) I’ve been keen to try my hand at them! So I did try and continuing with the Bake Off theme, I decided to make mini fondant fancies (technical challenge, final); yeah that was a good plan!

The saga of icing these is below!

I think I may have figured out why fondant fancies are a technical challenge; these were really annoying to ice! I was attempting to balance these on a spoon or a fork and then spoon the icing over them. That didn’t work as the cake kept falling off and landing in the bowl which led to my icing getting filled with cake crumbs! I also tried holding the cake and spooning icing over, that just led to sticky fingers!  My hands were covered in icing! Also this icing looks really thick but is deceptively runny, which meant I managed to drip icing onto the floor on more than one occasion!
 I think the best way to ice these is to put them on a wire rack and spoon the icing over and place with big plate/tray underneath to catch the icing that drips off. This wasn’t an option for me as I didn’t have a plate big enough! The result of this is that my cakes haven’t been iced very well, but since the icing is green I’m pretending that it’s ectoplasm and therefore meant to look like this! Oh yeah if you want to add sprinkles, let the icing sit on the cake for a bit first, I applied sprinkles soon after icing and they escaped down the side of the cake while the icing flowed!
 My cake was also too crumby, so I think a Genoese sponge might work better than a Victoria sponge mix, oh well this was a total experiment which I made up as I went along! And most importantly I had fun trying!

I made a chocolate cake for these but feel free to change the cake flavour to whatever you prefer. These would probably look pretty awesome with a Red Velvet Cake as an example. For the icing I used gel food colouring for these as I wanted a really vibrant colour, if you want a more pastel colour I would suggest using the liquid food dyes available in the baking aisle of most supermarkets. Again feel free to change the colour to whatever you prefer if green isn’t your thing!

Cake170g/6oz butter, softened
170g/6oz caster sugar
3 eggs
150g/5oz self rising flour, sifted
20g/1oz coco powder, sifted

Icing and decorations500g fondant icing sugar
6 tbsp cold water
Green food colouring
Bat and ghost sprinkles

Equipment
8 inch square cake pan, greased and lined
Wire rack
Petit Four sized paper cases

Method
Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 4/180 C
Cream together the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs. Fold in the flour and coco powder then pour into the prepared cake pan. Spread the cake mixture evenly across the tin, try and get the surface as smooth as possible. Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the thickest part of the cake comes out clean. Leave the cake to cool in the pan for about 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.
Once the cake has cooled slice it up into small squares, I managed to get 36 squares out of my cake. Cut bigger slices if you don’t want petit fours. To make up the icing sift the icing sugar into a bowl, add the water and mix well. Then add the food colouring and mix until you have a nice even colour. To ice the cakes place on a wire rack with a plate underneath and spoon over the cakes, try not to leave any gaps! Leave for a few minutes then add sprinkles if you want, leave to dry. Then arrange the cakes in paper cases.

Look closely and you can see some escaping sprinkles!

(Apologies for the fact this recipe has only just been posted, I wrote it a few days ago but unfortuately I lost internet access over the weekend and have only just been able to post it!)

Upcoming Treats

If you are a regular visitor here (I like to convince myself that people do re-visit this blog!) you may have noticed that once again my update schedule has gone a little wonky. However there is a reason for this (and I promise it's not life getting in the way), normal activity has temporarily been suspended because I have been planning some spooky new treats...

Yep if my cunning use of the word "treat" hasn't given it away (or the fact I'm announcing new stuff in October...) I have been planning some Halloween themed posts for this month. So what do I have in store? Well mostly pic spam of my Halloween themed cakes but there will also be some simple decorating tutorials and an awesome book review. Oh and a completely un-spooky discussion of The Great British Bake Off as the final is next week.

The new posts shall start on Saturday and there isn't really a plan for what order they go up in, so stay tuned!

Monday Recipe: Apple and Cinnamon Flapjack

Sadly I ran out of natural light today so these haven't been photographed yet. Hopefully I shall be able to tomorrow and will update this entry then! (This is entirely dependent on the flapjack making it through the night!)

One of the best things about Graze boxes is the range of flapjacks they offer, the best of which has to be the apple and cinnamon flapjack. This recipe is my attempt to recreate my favourite snack!

You want to use a good brown sugar for this, it really adds to the flavour. I normally use Demerara sugar but soft brown sugar (light or dark) work equally well so use whichever sugar you prefer. I don’t suggest using fresh apple in this recipe; I think it would go rather sloppy and make a rather wet flapjack. Try and find dried apple, I found this in Asda quite cheaply but be warned that it might not be sold under the name dried apple. When I brought mine it was being sold as “baked apple”.

Ingredients
120g/4oz brown sugar
120g/4oz butter
170g/6oz rolled oats
1 tbsp (approx) golden syrup
25g/1oz of dried apple, chopped
2 tsp ground cinnamon

Method
Preheat the oven to gas mark 2 /150 C and line a 17cm square tin with baking paper. In a pan melt together the sugar, butter and golden syrup. Once they have melted together add in the oats, apple and cinnamon. Mix well and press firmly into the tin. Bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes until golden brown, leave to cool in the tin. While the flapjack is still warm cut it into as many pieces as you want.

These quantities work in bigger baking pans, however if you use a much bigger tin I would suggest either doubling the quantities or using 1 and half times the quantities. (So 9oz of oats instead of 6oz)