halloween 2011!!!

I love Halloween! This year I made my first scarecrow! A few kids actually got scared (and so did I, twice in one day.. actually twice within 10 minutes!) which left me thoroughly satisfied. Planning for this holiday began early for me when I was at Party City and saw Wilton Icing Knives. I wasn't sure what I'd do with them, but I knew it was a good idea just to have them. Then my friend Jon posted this link to my facebook for Frankenstein marshmallow pops. I tried these out before Halloween:
Love those Wilton candy eyes!! I added silver sprinkles as the bolts. I also bought two Halloween magazines--Martha Stewart and Taste of Home. They always have great ideas. Yes, it would be a good Halloween.

Mike and I bought a build-your-own haunted gingerbread house kit from the grocery store.
It came with the walls of the house, black & orange icing, sprinkles, jelly beans, sugar ghosts, jack-o-lantern gumballs and candy corn.

Of course I got into the spirit of things by wearing my bunny ears (we always have some kind of costume lying around).


You can also see our cute Halloween dishtowel on the oven handle.
Well here's the house!
Then we decorated it:
Ooooooh! Spooky! All the icing was dripping off and the decorations (especially the jellybeans) were not sticking. Oh well! We kept it in the fridge that night. Here's what Mike put on the roof:

I thought it was a nice touch! Spooky spider! I took a picture of the 2 of us with our house:


That was that for the house. We almost forgot to bring it out for the party! The day of the party (or the day before, since the big crazy snowstorm pretty much snowed everyone in, giving me more prep time) I made the pretzel rod witch fingers. I got the mold at AC Moore and the candy melts at Michaels (and another bag at Reny's when we were visiting Portland, ME).

This was my first time using two different colored chocolate melts (actually they were both vanilla-flavored, I think) in one mold. They all say to use a brush, but I didn't want to buy a new paintbrush or use an older one even though I washed them... So I just used a spoon as usual but I was very careful, and wiped off a lot of the extraneous parts with a paper towel.

Oooh! They came out so good! :) I put them all together in a jar with some pumpkin pie-flavored popcorn (also from our Maine trip):
Then I made the cupcakes (which is what this blog is really about)!!
Yum! These were pumpkin spice cupcakes from the Sprinkles mix! What I love about Sprinkles is their mixes come in big tubes and have the recipe for from-scratch icing, so you can feel proud & say you made at least some of it from scratch. It also bakes 12 cupcakes, so if you're only expecting a small crowd, you don't have to eat the other 12 yourself ;)

Mike found the wrappers for me--I'd seen them at Stop & Shop and had been looking for them all month, until he found them at Shaw's (again, in Maine). My friend Katherine and I had just been talking about how some wrappers are so cute, but once you bake them, the oil seeps through and you can't see the cute decorations anymore (I think I mentioned this in the post I did about the malted cupcakes). Well these were tin AND in Halloween colors!

I had also bought this cardboard cupcake tower at Michaels. Mike helped me set it up and I put my cupcakes on it, along with the candy knives!

Spooooky! I also put some red icing dripping down the stabbed cupcakes, and on some extra knives I had.
Michaels also had these great wooden boxes in the shape of coffins! I bought two and painted them. I put a Hershey's mix inside and made a little gravestone:
Oh, I crack myself up!
Then I made the marshmallow Frankensteins! The hair kept making me laugh because they ended up looking like nice gentlemen instead of scary monsters.
I ran out of candy eyes :( so I used chocolate chips on some of them. I thought they looked like girls so I gave them red lips! The cool silhouette border is actually a bunch of cupcake wrappers connected to each other. They were part of Chef Duff's cake and cupcake line, but they were too big for my cupcakes. Here's a Frankenstein I gave the Flock of Seagulls haircut to:
We also had spooky cocktails!
I got the idea from Dylan's Candy Bar (which I will post about at a later date). Dylan Lauren has a book out and had these wax lips on the rim of a drink as a suggestion for a Halloween party! Duly noted, Dylan! This was garnishing a cocktail I came up with: pumpkin liqueur, light cream and marshmallow vodka. Yum! It was a party favorite :) I called it Pumpkin Cream. Or, actually, Pumpkin Scream (for Halloween).

Funny enough, the only thing I ended up getting out of the Martha Stewart magazine was the idea for hanging paper bats above the cocktail area.
There was a template and I cut them out of construction paper. How cute!!

And, of course, our costumes (including Mike's cats):

Chunks as a bull, I guess, with a cowboy riding on him! Or just a giant cat with a cowboy riding him... or a regular-sized cat with a tiny man...


My brothers, David (as a bunny) and Hiro (as a Japanese street vendor) with me (Peg Bundy):
And my friends Kim (as Edward Scissorhands) and Katherine (as Little Red Riding Hood)!
There were other friends who I didn't get pictures of, but it was a very fun night indeed. Hope you had a spooky and fun Halloween!!

where the wild things are... cupcakes!

So I was Max from Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak this Halloween. We'd had all these promotional displays at work (movies based on books are a big deal for bookstores), and I saw the movie a few weekends ago. So with all this ado about it, and the cute hat Max wears, how could I not be him for Halloween?


Also, when I was making the Monsters, Inc. cake pops last month, I got a bunch of ideas for Where the Wild Things Are-themed baked goods. So I thought, why not make cupcakes to match my costume?? And share the wealth with my co-workers?

I started out with a batch of devil's food cupcakes (how appropriate!) and whipped vanilla frosting. I got all the decorating candies at Fuzziwigs. The sprinkles were all Wilton. I also bought more melting chocolates (the ones I had were peppermint--I wanted to use white chocolate).

I thought I'd try making a monster first (rather than Max) since I was so excited... Here's the decorating ideas I laid out on wax paper:

Ha! Things are lookin' good. The eyes are yellow Spree candies, the noses are heart-shaped hard candies. The horns, beak and head-feathers are all gummy fruit wedges. The red hair is sour tape and the black hair is licorice (which I ended up not using because it had hardened and was difficult to cut, plus it was hard to chew and didn't taste too good anyway). Oh and the blue nostrils on the bull-looking face are chocolate-covered sunflower seeds!

I decided to make the bird-monster first. He seemed to have the simplest structure: beak, feathers, eye. I put white nonpareil sprinkles on the bottom half to look like the small feather pattern. Then I stuck on the fruit wedges and the Spree eye:

Of course there's a bottom part to the beak and many more feathers that could go in there, but I didn't have any extra fruit wedges to spare. Plus the oven was on and it happened to be a warm Halloween, so the pieces began to slide off. He spent the rest of the decorating time in the fridge!

I then separated some of the vanilla frosting into a bowl and put one drop of red food coloring and one drop of yellow to make a peach skin tone. (I had taken notes on Maurice's artwork from his book during my break at work so I'd know what colors and shapes to use!) It looks kind of like the "anything muppets" Jim Henson had--the kind you add things to to give it a personality:

Look it has a mouth! I didn't mean to do that! I decided to make this one the redhead (being one myself):

Aww... The teeth are white chocolate melts cut into small triangles, and the mouth was that old trick of putting icing in a Ziploc, pushing it to the corner, and snipping a tiny hole (if you don't have a fancy pastry bag!).

I made Max next by icing a cupcake with white, then the skin-tone over it on the middle-to-bottom part. I rimmed the white edges in white sparkling sugar. My original plan was to melt some of the white chocolate and pipe it out in triangle shapes for the ears. Well, I put them in a Ziploc bag in a bowl and microwaved them. The directions said to knead in between microwaving, but I found out too late that the chocolate had melted through the bag! Melted chocolate got all over my hand--ow! So I suggest microwaving in 10-second intervals instead of 30!

That incident kind of killed the dream of shaping melted chocolate into whatever I desired, so I went with the simpler approach of cutting the melting wafers into triangle shapes (duh) and stuck those in. I then used the chocolate icing to draw his face. My first attempt looked like Doug Funnie in a Max costume:

Then I realized he looked too nice and I went for the true Max face:


I am SO proud of this one! I hope it would make Maurice proud, too. The chocolate icing really behaved as it came out of the bag, and the sugar really looks like fuzz!

I used the redhead face template again to make the "main character" monster (I've always seen him as the main character even though that nice bull-like one is on the cover). You know, the one with the striped shirt (body). I used that amazing European chocolate bar, Flake, as the hair and beard. I broke it up into small pieces and spread them around the head. Then I piped some more chocolate icing around it:

The horns are also the melting wafers, just cut in half.

Then I made my personal favorite, the bull-like one. This one gets to be blue! I put a drop of blue food coloring in a Dixie cup full of icing and put that on the cupcake. I added the eyes, fruit wedges (horns and ears), sunflower seeds (nostrils), icing mouth and melting wafer teeth (cut into square shapes). I almost forgot about the blue sprinkles I had picked up the day before!! I think that was the finishing touch that made this one come out so nicely. The one in the book has a mound of fluff or fur on top of his head which the glitter mimicked pretty well:

The plate even looks like the plants from Where the Wild Things Are!

So here they all are together:

And on a plate:

Yay!!

With the leftover cupcakes and what remained of the decorations (not much), I made some blue claw cupcakes and some title cupcakes:


The claws are--you guessed it!--white chocolate melting wafers cut in half! I'm so glad I bought those.

I made these to bring into work with my costume on, so here they all are in the amazing Cupcake Courier:


A few close-ups!!

This one has some significance if you've seen the movie:


And of course here's me in my costume holding my darlings:


Here I am with my costumed co-workers/friends:
Colonel Mustard, his girlfriend The Maid (both from Clue), Billy Mays in front of them, Paper Bag Princess (from the Robert Munsch book of the same name), a Pirate, Peter Pan, and me, Max!

Here is one of the cupcakes with his stuffed animal counterpart:

Here's one last picture taken at work with the artwork we usually have above the hardcover picture books:

They were then left in the break room where the REAL wild things are ;) Happy Halloween!