I love Halloween. I love it in an all consuming, can't live without it, pee-my-pants excited kind of way. From the minute October (which just happens to be my favorite month) appears on my calendar, I get down right giddy. Immediately I want to bust out with the fake spiderwebs, spooky sound effects, pumpkin carving, costumes, jiggly skeletons and my very beat up copy of
Hocus Pocus. In fact, I plan my All Hallows' Eve costume months in advance, each year hoping to walk away my most creative costume ever. All this is made more ironic by the fact that I hate to be scared. I hate scary movies. I hate when people pop out at me. I hate things that go bump in the night. I hate ghosts. I hate spooky woods. I even hate it when my friends try to bust into my apartment unannounced. Beginning to get the picture here? BUT I
love Halloween. Go figure. To celebrate my favorite holiday, I decided to couple one love with another: Halloween and Cupcakery. After getting some fondant inspiration from Michael's, of all places, I sat down to plan what kind of cupcake I would create. These had to be knockouts. They were to be a representation of Halloween! After much deliberation, it hit me: PUMPKIN! Pumpkin is the embodiment of all things Halloweeny. To the Internet I went, where I found and modified a fantastic pumpkin cupcake recipe. The next step was the filling. I had decided that filled cupcakes would be my "signature," so filling they must have. Cream filling would not go with these pumpkin treats, so I tweaked my recipe and made a brown sugar cream filling. The next step was to decide on a frosting. Time to once again hit the books, as they say, and when I finally resurfaced I had found a wonderful cinnamon cream cheese frosting. The combination was knock-your-socks-off delicious. I decided to pass these treats out at the school, accompanied by a silly Halloween poem I wrote (I am a teacher after all...). They were a hit!
Ghosts, Pumpkins, Black Cats, and Bats... Looks like Halloween to me!
Until next time, sweet dreams!
-J