Halloween Fun!

Halloween is my favorite month :)  Not only do I love the festivities, but it is a time where things slow down enough for me to have time to play with my food.  Below is a little of the fun that is going on in my kitchen.

I'll start with the eyes, so they can watch over the rest of this post.

For the meringue eyeballs, use your favorite meringue recipe and method. There are so many theories as to how long to bake and what temp. You don't want these to brown much or the colors will go funky on that so keep that in mind. Simply pipe into round or oval mounds, next to each other, two at a time. After they cooled, I used royal icing for the pupils. Piping another color of meringue on top or using candies works well too.

For the above Halloween pancakes use a fairly thin batter. If you have an electric skillet that you can regulate the temp well that is best. Keep the temp around 200F to keep them from browning.  You don't want these to be too think or they will take forever to cook or not even cook completely at all.  Use piping bags or bottles to free hand designs or use greased metal cookie cutters to hold the shapes.  

What is Halloween without candy corn?  These were for the concession stand at my son's football game.  They are ridiculously simple.  Use a round pan and build from the outside edge towards the center. You can make 3 batches or do as I do and eyeball it. Once they set up use a skewer to poke in a hole and then add your stick or sturdy straw.

Have a great rest of Halloween month everyone!

Wedding Cake Round-up

What a rocking summer here in my kitch!  I'm finally at a point that I can catch up on cake posts. Gotta get it in fast before holiday baking begins.  Over the next few weeks I'll try to get these on the blog.  There will be a few halloween posts thrown in too.  It's gonna be an interesting mix :)

Each of the cakes this year were so different from each other. I have a hard time deciding which one shall go first. Let's start with one of my favorite type of style, rustic elegance.

My clients were had a few rustic twig and vine style cakes, which are cool, but not as original.  After perusing the net and some sketching I suggested this one. Lucky for me, the bride loved the idea as well.

It was inspired by several spackle styles and one cake with wooden flowers.  The shape of the wooden flowers was so different compared to most cakes I have seen, almost poppy like but not quite. These of course aren't wood :)  As a finishing touch plum luster dust was brushed on the flowers to give them depth.

The top layer is red velvet with cream cheese swiss merigue filling. The bottom layer is vanilla almond cake with from scratch fresh raspberry curd.  The final coat over the entire cake was an vanilla almond swiss meringue buttercream.