Saturday, October 27, 2007

Halloween Birthday Party - 10/26/2007

My roommate's birthday is next week, so we had a get-together for her last night. There were some recipes I wanted to make to both pander to her tastes and show a little Halloween spirit.

Wicked Cupcakes


Wicked Cupcakes Close-Up

First are Wicked Cupcakes, a recipe from Food Network. In the online pictures, the cupcakes were a bit cleaner and more intricately decorated, but I think mine looked just fine. They are chocolate cupcakes with a peanut butter and cream cheese frosting to make the head. The hats are Oreo wafers and their features are made with various candies. The birthday girl ended up helping me with these, so I do have to thank her for that.

Fondue

Next was a chocolate fondue. I am not posting pictures of the fondue itself, since I think most people can imagine a pot of chocolate. Above are all of the "dippins" that I put out: pineapple, strawberries, pretzels, oreos, and bananas. The fondue was flavored with a hazelnut liqueur, but I could not taste it too much. Also, I think the heat source was too hot because the chocolate started to burn and separate. But it is really hard to ruin the taste of chocolate so people were eating it anyways. Not pictured is a frozen pound cake that I cubed which was quite delicious with the fondue.

S'mores Pie

The last dish I am showing is my own creation: S'mores Pie. I first baked a graham cracker crust. For the filling, I melted together chocolate chips, whipping cream and marshmallows. The filling ended up setting up very densely and it was almost like fudge, but it was pretty good. For decoration, I put dollops of whipped cream for each slice topped with homemade marshmallows. The marshmallows are a bit more slippery than normal marshmallows and they tend to melt more than they brown over an open flame, but they tasted just about right. For a final touch, I sprinkled the top with graham cracker crumbs and shaved chocolate.

I attempted to make a pumpkin panna cotta, but they did not set up fully in the ghost and pumpkin molds I had, so I did not take a picture. That recipe still needs a little tweaking before it is blog-worthy. Once most everyone arrived, I also started cooking midnight breakfast: pina colada pancakes (pancakes with pineapple and coconut), bacon and eggs benedict. It was an extremely stuffing night, but it was a lot of fun.

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