Halloween Baking

This past Christmas me and the kiddos received a Disney’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Official Baking Cookbook. The girls are obsessed with the movie and are now fanatic about our occasional weekend baking projects. We have made quite a few and these are the lessons we have learned using this book.

If you strictly go by the recipe there are a ton of things you need to make these treats properly. I used what I had on hand with a variety of outcomes. Two things that were essential to every project: NEON food coloring- doesn’t seem to matter the brand, but to capture the true halloween tones these were the best, the other was just one package of black cookie icing with the piping. tip included. Keep in mind that the black icing will completely stain your mouth and teeth for the rest of the day- use with caution.

Man-Eating Wreath Giant Chocolate Chip Cookie

The main takeaway from this project was that you will need more icing then you think. I was too intimidated to try the homemade buttercream and bought a tube of ready made. That covered maybe a quarter of the actually cookie. I then dyed some cake frosting and covered another half. In the end, the only solution was to destroy my carefully pipped texted and smear the whole thing.

The details I also took some liberties with replacing the red candies with raspberries and the candy melt eyes with butter cookies. I also used shaved almonds instead of the slivered and I actually like the effect more.

Creepy Candy Bug Cake

I am not going to lie- I used all store bought for this bad boy, but it turned out supper fun. I used two 8” cake pans and one glass mixing bowl to bake the cake and had the shape turn out fairly decent.

I will say having gummy worms with a bite of cake is not appealing to all and when you refrigerate any remaining cake the works turn to stone. And just a reminder that black frosting will be with you the rest of the day.

Dr. Finkelstein Charlotte Royale Brain Cake

This one really does feel like a crazy science experiment. It takes a while and you don’t know if it actually worked for about an hour or more. The directions are really good on with this one and thanks to my obsession with the great British baking show I knew that it was super important to roll it while cake is still warm.

I did opt for adding red food coloring thinking it would like more brainy and I do not recommend that since it looks even less like a brain that way. Be sure to use enough raspberry jam in your jelly roll since the cake got very dry during the chilling process.

The last tip is to be caution with the amount of gelatin powder you add to the filling. I went a little over-board as I was concerned about it not setting at all and the it became rubber.

Sally Blue Helping Hand Cookies

So I really struggled with these cookies and these were the top mistakes- I would say add more lemon extract then is recommended as they did not taste of lemon hardly at all. Absolutely refrigerate the suggested amount of time. I did not and they lost all shape. Finally, find a hand cookie cutter with the fingers completely separate.

Slithery Gift-Gobbling Snake Bundt Cake

This was a lot of fun because the kiddos really got into decorating our “snake cake” which did lose some of the snake-iness, but still turned out delicious. The sour cream added so much richness to the cake that I am adding to all future cakes and the texture of the candies with the hint go peanut but gave a lot of dimension.

Be sure to grease the heck out of the bundt pan as I did lose a good deal of snake body and as mentioned above we could only find Reese’s Pieces, but the worked out super.

Marshmallow Meringue Skeleton Bones Sheet Cake

The biggest challenge of this cake was of course the meringue. I have never made meringue and wasn’t even totally sure what I was making once I started the recipe.

It begins with the chocolate cake and the recipe is very basic- the coffee does seem to be key as it really adds dimension to the chocolate flavor. And because it was already in my cabniet I used a premade frosting.

For the meringue I followed the recipe to the T, however I could never achieve the consistency that was described. I went ahead with a softer consistency and aside from making the piping a little tricky, it was still delicious. I discovered with this project that my oven does not heat evenly, so be sure to keep an eye on your own appliance as it burned the bones in one corner, Meringue is apparently very sensitive.

The whole. thing ended up pretty tasty although because the kids fell in love with the bones the disappeared from the cake almost immediately leaving the rest of us to enjoy a plane ol’ chocolate cake. This may have been for the best as the longer the bone sit on the frosting the soggier they get.

Pumpkin King Pumpkin Pie

What do you do if you are not a fan of pumpkin pie? Well, you make a cheese cake instead. I followed the very first recipe in my bing (that’s right-Bing) results and it was super. You can find it here.

and the rest…

Deadly Nightshade Blue Cake Parfait called for buttercream between each layer. Now I am a fan of buttercream, but even that seems a bit much, so I opted for whipped cream and it turned out so much lighter and paired perfectly with the fresh fruit.

Bag of Bugs Hi-Hat Cupcakes were my one and only attempt at buttercream and it was not a success, not sure why it was so heavy-maybe not enough whipping, but you could only eat a few bites before it was just sickly sweet.

Sally Patchwork Cookie Hearts were the best project with the kids, They loved dying the dough and then mixing it together. Also great to freeze and cook in small batches to avoid a sugar coma for the little ones.