Happy Halloween! Eyeball Cupcakes

To celebrate all things ghoulish and creepy on Halloween, I decided to make eyeball cupcakes. Freaky, right?

 I started with a Red Velvet cupcake. Making the eyeballs was surprisingly easy.

 Step 1: Cover the cupcakes in a smooth white frosting.

 Step 2: Using a frosting bag (small-medium sized tip), make a circle in the middle of the cupcake, the "iris"  using frosting that you've dyed blue.

 Step 3: Also using a frosting bag (with a very small tip), pipe the "veins" around the blue "iris", using frosting that you've dyed red. Finish off by melting a little chocolate and adding a dot in the middle as the "pupil."























If you don't have a frosting bag, you can probably use the gel decorating icing in the tube.

I got the idea from the blog Dinner: A Love Story.

Happy Birthday Papa!

On their wedding day, my dad asked my mom for only one thing. My dad told my mom that he had had a cake on all of his birthdays, and would like a cake on all of his birthdays to come. This year as a gift, I wanted to bake him his very own cake. 

This recipe is very similar to my Chocolate Salted Caramel Cupcakes, but instead its in cake form. When assembling the cake, you are supposed to slice the layers so that you end up with four layers, but I was running out of time so I skipped this step. If I hadn't, the cake would have been better since the caramel would have soaked into the cake.

I finished the cake of with a dark chocolate caramel ganache, which was extremely rich. I prefer this recipe in cupcake form, but I want to try this again with more time. 

I used this recipe.

Peach Crumble Bars

It has taken me a long time to get this up here, but here they are, finally. 

The other week for Cooking Club, the theme was fruit. I had a few frozen bags of peaches hiding in the back of my freezer just waiting to be used, so I found a recipe for Peach Crumble Bars. 

The recipe starts with the crumble, which has a satisfying buttery flavor. Once you grease your pan, you have to press about half of the dough into the bottom to create a flat base layer. 

I used frozen peaches, which worked just fine, though the recipe calls for fresh cut peaches. I love the combination of nutmeg with peaches in this recipe. The peaches go on top of the base. 

Crumble the remaining half of the dough on top of the peaches.

                       

I was expecting chunks of peaches in the final product, but during the baking process, they lost their shape and became softer. It wasn't bad, but I wish they had the texture of the peaches. 

The original recipe uses a 9x13 inch pan, but I only had an 8x8.  To accommodate the size difference, I cut the recipe in half, which worked out perfectly. While this was  not my favorite outcome, I want to play with different fruits in the future and see if I can perfect the recipe.