Graveyard Cupcakes

Happy Halloween! Anyone have any fun Halloween plans? Or a cool Halloween costume planned? I celebrated Halloween early with a party on Friday where I served all of these treats that I've been posting about here. It was quite fun, and in case you were wondering, I dressed up as Medusa with a black toga and snakes in my hair.

One of the desserts I served at the party were these Graveyard Cupcakes. The cool thing about these is that this decoration method can basically be applied to any cupcake/frosting recipe of your choice. All you need are some chocolate cookie crumbs and the tombstone cookies. I ended up making two types of cupcakes: pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and chocolate peanut butter cup cupcakes with peanut butter frosting (recipe below).

I wanted the tombstone cookies to look gray like stone, so I thought to make a black sesame shortbread cookie decorated with a bit of melted chocolate. And to make them easier to prepare, I sliced them from a log rather than cut them all out individually. I was also inspired by those kiddy crafts that use cookie crumbs as dirt, like potted flower cakes or dirt & worms. It turned out quite well with these cupcakes.

Jack Sparrow's Tricorne

The weather is sunny once again, so I'll be continuing with last posts's pirate theme. I realized that I didn't make a single reference to Pirates of the Caribbean in my last post, which is odd because when I think "pirates," Disney's POTC always comes to mind. Well, I'll make up for that today since I made Tricorne Cookies.

[map of Piri Reis in background found on Google Images]

What's a tricorne? It's a three cornered hat that was popular back in the early 18th century. An example of this style of headwear is of course Jack Sparrow's hat. I had a bag of peanut butter cups lying around and I thought it would be cute to make little chocolate pirate hat cookies stuffed with PB cups, like nuggets of hidden treasure in each hat. On another note, did you know that there's going to be a fourth movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (May 2011)? I just found out today as I was Wikipedia-ing info on Jack's hat. Enjoy!

[ballpoint pen on a large index card, referenced from Disney movie poster]

I: Zombies!

I guess you should know that I love holidays (and anything else that has a theme). That being said, I think the best way for me to start off my blog is to post about Halloween. Today will be the first post in my 4 part "monster" series.

Monster of the day: Zombies! When I see the picture above, I imagine the ground cracking open as zombies try to pry their way out of the dirt, like in a horror film. At least that's what happened as the macaron shells were baking. I "accidentally" put the shells in the oven before the skins were completely dry, so as the macaron feet were forming, the middle of the shells began bulging out and cracking, like fists were trying to punch their way out below the chocolaty macaron tops. Quite an entertaining thing to watch. It was definitely a sign that these were meant to be Halloween macarons!

Before starting college, when I still went trick-or-treating, my favorite candies to receive were always those of the peanut butter chocolate variety, like Reese's pieces or those funny Halloween-themed half chocolate/half peanut butter coins. But... now that I'm too busy with studying (and possibly too old?) to go trick-or-treating, this year I decided to create a more upscale twist on my beloved childhood PB & Chocolate combination by playing around with the filling in my favorite Pierre Hermé chocolate macaron recipe. So even though I still enjoy peanut butter cups very much, I must admit that these macarons are wayyy tastier!