Showing posts with label Halloween. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Halloween. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Monday, October 31, 2011
Halloween Cake Pops!
So I was supposed to go to Lady's Halloween party on Saturday. Lady is my best friend from college, and she only lives 45 minutes away from me. I made Halloween cake pops on Friday afternoon, and went crazy because my new 9x13 pan burnt my first cake. So I ran back to the store and bought 2 more boxes of Devils Food cake mix just in case. The second time I baked the cake, I ended up taking it out of the oven 13 minutes early. This new pan is killing me, and I couldn't find my usual cake pops pan. Thankfully, the cake was done and not burnt. So here's my cake pops tutorial.
1. Bake the cake of your choice. If it's a light-colored cake, remove the ends and any brown parts. This doesn't matter with dark cakes.
2. Crumble cake into a bowl until you have uniform small crumbs. Add frosting and mix together until cake and frosting mix holds together well. You will use about 3/4 of a container of frosting.
3. Melt some chocolate in the color you are going to cover your cake pops with. I chose orange. Dip your lollipop sticks in the chocolate so the tip of one end is covered.
4. Make a ball out of the cake and frosting mix. Insert the chocolate covered stick halfway into the ball.
5. Once you have a bunch of pops made, stick them in the freezer for about 30 minutes, until they are firm but not frozen.
6. Melt more chocolate and dip each of the pops. Tap off excess chocolate, and stick into a foam block to dry. You need about 2 bags of candy wafers for every cake you crumble.
7. Once pops are dry, you can decorate with edible markers or use more chocolate as glue for big sprinkles or other decorations. I was planning on making them jack-o-lantern pops, but my black edible marker crapped out after the first one I did and the other colors didn't look right. So they're plain orange.
I don't know where everyone who reads this lives, but we had a freak snowstorm in New York on Saturday. It was treacherous out and we got 9" of snow where I live. Needless to say, I did not make it to my party, so I have 30 cake pops sitting around in my house.
This is the photo I took from my bedroom on Saturday afternoon of the tree bent so far that the branches were touching the ground, blocking me from even leaving my house. Thankfully, when some of the snow melted on Sunday, the branches rose back up to where they're supposed to be, although there were a lot of downed trees and power outages in my area.
Happy Halloween everyone! I hope you liked the cake pops tutorial and my cat on a fence pumpkin!
1. Bake the cake of your choice. If it's a light-colored cake, remove the ends and any brown parts. This doesn't matter with dark cakes.
2. Crumble cake into a bowl until you have uniform small crumbs. Add frosting and mix together until cake and frosting mix holds together well. You will use about 3/4 of a container of frosting.
3. Melt some chocolate in the color you are going to cover your cake pops with. I chose orange. Dip your lollipop sticks in the chocolate so the tip of one end is covered.
4. Make a ball out of the cake and frosting mix. Insert the chocolate covered stick halfway into the ball.
5. Once you have a bunch of pops made, stick them in the freezer for about 30 minutes, until they are firm but not frozen.
6. Melt more chocolate and dip each of the pops. Tap off excess chocolate, and stick into a foam block to dry. You need about 2 bags of candy wafers for every cake you crumble.
7. Once pops are dry, you can decorate with edible markers or use more chocolate as glue for big sprinkles or other decorations. I was planning on making them jack-o-lantern pops, but my black edible marker crapped out after the first one I did and the other colors didn't look right. So they're plain orange.
I don't know where everyone who reads this lives, but we had a freak snowstorm in New York on Saturday. It was treacherous out and we got 9" of snow where I live. Needless to say, I did not make it to my party, so I have 30 cake pops sitting around in my house.
This is the photo I took from my bedroom on Saturday afternoon of the tree bent so far that the branches were touching the ground, blocking me from even leaving my house. Thankfully, when some of the snow melted on Sunday, the branches rose back up to where they're supposed to be, although there were a lot of downed trees and power outages in my area.
Happy Halloween everyone! I hope you liked the cake pops tutorial and my cat on a fence pumpkin!
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
My Favorite Halloween Costume
It was my final year trick-or-treating. I was 14 and in ninth grade, and wasn't sure if I was too old to trick-or-treat. A lot of the other kids in my grade were going to Halloween parties, but I wasn't invited to any.
I was too old for the cutesy kid costumes and too young (and chubby) for the skanky grown-up ones. I didn't know what to do until my dad came up with the perfect idea: wear his army dress greens from Vietnam.
My dad and I went to our basement and he opened the green metal cabinet that I'd always overlooked. Inside hung two pristine uniforms: my dad's and my uncle's.
Examining the uniform and the dog tags was like visiting history. I asked my dad a ton of questions about his time in the service. I discovered that he was in Chem Corps and got to stay in the states, while my uncle was a medic stationed in Germany. My dad joked that his brother came back 20 pounds heavier from all the food he ate there.
I tried on the uniforms, and, although my dad's was too small, my uncle's fit. I called my best friend Iris, and she agreed to wear my dad's uniform.
On Halloween, we donned the caps, jackets, and trousers and went out. Trick-or-treating was not that fun, and at one point, the police even stopped to ask us where we had been because some kids vandalized a house. I was self-conscious about being too old, and a little embarrassed and upset that I wasn't going to a party like everyone else.
But I loved my costume. I learned a lot from my dad because of it. I felt like I was wearing history, which made me want to learn more about the Vietnam War. It was like I was finally privy to a piece of family history that had eluded me until that point.
I got to look at old photos of my dad and uncle when they were in the service. I found out my dad really did have a giant fro (I never believed it before I saw it), and that he looked like the guy in Welcome Back Kotter.
So even though the trick-or-treating experience wasn't the best, the costume and everything I learned about my family as a result made it an incredible experience.
This post was written in response to this week's RemembeRED prompt from Write on Edge. For Tuesday, reach back to a costume that made an impression. Was it yours? A friend’s? Maybe it was a costume you never got to wear. Show it to us with your words, draw us into the emotions it evoked at the time. Word limit is 400.
Also, I'm sorry if this post is not up to my usual caliber. My youngest, Goober, has been really sick with a high fever since Thursday so I've been preoccupied and totally unfocused.
I was too old for the cutesy kid costumes and too young (and chubby) for the skanky grown-up ones. I didn't know what to do until my dad came up with the perfect idea: wear his army dress greens from Vietnam.
My dad and I went to our basement and he opened the green metal cabinet that I'd always overlooked. Inside hung two pristine uniforms: my dad's and my uncle's.
Examining the uniform and the dog tags was like visiting history. I asked my dad a ton of questions about his time in the service. I discovered that he was in Chem Corps and got to stay in the states, while my uncle was a medic stationed in Germany. My dad joked that his brother came back 20 pounds heavier from all the food he ate there.
I tried on the uniforms, and, although my dad's was too small, my uncle's fit. I called my best friend Iris, and she agreed to wear my dad's uniform.
On Halloween, we donned the caps, jackets, and trousers and went out. Trick-or-treating was not that fun, and at one point, the police even stopped to ask us where we had been because some kids vandalized a house. I was self-conscious about being too old, and a little embarrassed and upset that I wasn't going to a party like everyone else.
But I loved my costume. I learned a lot from my dad because of it. I felt like I was wearing history, which made me want to learn more about the Vietnam War. It was like I was finally privy to a piece of family history that had eluded me until that point.
I got to look at old photos of my dad and uncle when they were in the service. I found out my dad really did have a giant fro (I never believed it before I saw it), and that he looked like the guy in Welcome Back Kotter.
So even though the trick-or-treating experience wasn't the best, the costume and everything I learned about my family as a result made it an incredible experience.
This post was written in response to this week's RemembeRED prompt from Write on Edge. For Tuesday, reach back to a costume that made an impression. Was it yours? A friend’s? Maybe it was a costume you never got to wear. Show it to us with your words, draw us into the emotions it evoked at the time. Word limit is 400.
Also, I'm sorry if this post is not up to my usual caliber. My youngest, Goober, has been really sick with a high fever since Thursday so I've been preoccupied and totally unfocused.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)