Happy Halloween!

Last night, my friend Maria and I engaged in the most haphazard baking extravaganza. We decided to bake multiple goodies, and headed to the grocery store-minus a grocery list. Not quite the best plan, but it certainly yielded hysterical laughter throughout the night!

Oh- and did I mention that we bake in style? Maria had been saving a bottle of champagne. With minimal consideration, we popped it open and toasted the baking bonanza that was to come.

We were planning on making a "Host of Ghosts" cake, a recipe that I found on epicurious.com. Well, technically, we intended to buy an angle food cake and decorate it. Unfortunately, there WAS no angel food cake at the grocery store, so instead, we got a deliciously moist and dense marble cake. The icing was supposed to be a light and fluffy vanilla one. However, as I said, very minimal planning went into this endeavor. When we realized that we only had one, for a two egg recipe, I pulled a solution out of my Swedish chef-style hat- literally, it's part of my Halloween costume. Thankfully, Maria had some chocolate chips in her house, and since we had about 18375 lbs. of icing sugar, I decided to use some of that too. I did the classic spider's web motif that 's created by dragging a toothpick through a spiral of colour; in this case chocolaty colour.

Et voila!

We also decided to make the classic Halloween Witch's finger cookies. Again, a recipe that we totally screwed up, and which in fact, turned out to be my favorite sweet of the evening. I made the mistake of allowing M to read out the recipe to me. After asking her three times "Maria, are you SURE there aren't any wet ingredients in this recipe?" I shrugged and put the dough in the fridge to harden. Then came the sinking feeling in my stomach about 15 minutes later when Maria was thrilled to find an 'extra' egg- not so much. We took the dough out, tossed in the egg, and voila: delicious witch's digits. Who knew? It was for this recipe that Maria coined a phrase that will forever be on the tip of my tongue: "Recipe schmecipe!"

so life-like...kinda makes you wonder?


Ah, the sight of fluffy, sugary vanilla frosting, just aching to be morphed into gooey green and pukey pink

Spooky Eyeball Sugar cookies

We also tried to make brain cupcakes. We used vanilla cake batter and coloured it hot pink! Apparently, I'm gonna have to brush up on my anatomy, because they looked more like girly ribbon cupcakes than gruesome brain. After about 2 minutes of sulking and two big gulps of champagne, I had the perfect solution: Colon cupcakes! Much to M's dissatisfaction, that is.

Colon cupcakes

Chocolate mmMummy cupcakes

Needless to say, our "fabulous" baking night turned out to be one of many challenges, supplemented by fits of giggles. We baked our hearts out from 7:30 until midnight, and I can't think of a better way to have spent Halloween eve!