Looking for ways to use up your pumpkin flesh after carving your scary pumpkins.
Why not take a look at my delicious recipe for Pumpkin and ginger cupcakes.
This is the recipe that won a competition and was also featured in the fundraising book by Macmillan ‘The little book of treats’.
Well it’s getting to that time of year again when the pumpkin carving kit comes out. As i am still trying to decide what to carve this year i have been searching the internet for ideas. Last year i did this spongebob pumpkin that won me a huge bag of Halloween goodies courtesy of Asda as previously shown here in last years Halloween antics post. This year i am just so undecided on what to do so if anyone has any ideas of what i should attempt to carve on my pumpkin this year please feel free to leave me a comment below.
Anyway before i get side tracked and start babbling on even more, i will get back on track now, where was i…oh yes that’s right. I was searching the internet for ideas when i came across some of the most amazing pumpkin carving i have even seen in my life. So although this post is not cake related i thought i would share with you all anyway so you can appreciate the amazing skills of this very talented artist.
Master Pumpkin Carver Ray Villafane brings his skills to The New York Botanical Gardens, October 21, 2012.
Food Network Challenge winner Zombie pumpkin carving by Ray Villafane
Here are a few more of my favourite pumpkin carvings by Ray Villafane.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/53074154@N00/5122573290/
If you would like to see more out of this world and truly amazing pumpkin carving designs from the brilliantly talented Ray Villafane
Check out the gallery on his website villafanestudios.com
Just be prepared to be amazed!!
Well this year i got very excited for Halloween and was really looking forward to it. Even more so when on Friday i had a really nice surprise in the form of a very exciting email from Asda. The email was announcing me as the winner of the Halloween pumpkin carving competition. Yes that’s right i won, still can’t believe it, it was like Christmas come early. My winning entry was also my first attempt at pumpkin carving and was carved to look like Spongebob. Even more unbelievable was the super speedy delivery of my prize, i literally blinked and it was here. I was super impressed with my prize. It was a massive bag of Halloween related goodies, perfect for our Halloween get together we were having on the Sunday. I couldn’t believe how many items there were (i think there were around 25 items altogether) from decorations and candles to glasses and a jug. Here is a picture of some of the items that were included in my prize bag.
and i just adore these little guys, didn’t have the heart to light them.
My other favourites were the skull jug and skull glasses.
All in all i can honestly say i was more than happy with my prize and the items i won were fantastic. Thanks Asda. The competition i won was hosted by Asda via twitter. Just incase you didn’t know Asda was on twitter you can follow them here.
Well our Halloween get together was brilliant. My husbands parents came to visit also, so it ended up been quite a good day. First i got the sweets ready for the trick or treaters.
and i didn’t even eat any of them (honest).
Next i prepared some buffet style food for everyone to eat and decorated the table.
The kids love Halloween and dressing up and so does the hubby.
We had a brains eating werewolf and a vampire
Jason Voorhees and Frankenstein.
and this guy, wouldn’t want to bump into him on a dark Halloween night……oohh!!
It doesn’t take a lot of guess-work as to what i made for dessert……yes you guessed it, cupcakes. Don’t know how you managed to guess right, on your first guess aswell.
I also made a special Birthday cupcake for my father in law as it had been his Birthday a few days before. The cupcake was made still with Halloween in mind and the fingers on top must have looked very realistic as when i gave it to him, he actually thought that i was passing him his cupcake with my own fingers in the buttercream eeewww. When i passed it to him he said “oh they are not your fingers”. Talk about laugh, in fact i will probably still be laughing about that next Halloween.
After the in-laws had left we took the kids trick or treating to a couple of the neighbours houses. I was shocked that we hardly had any this year, which is just typical as i was armed up to the eyeballs with sweets. I then spend the rest of the evening watching Halloween Simpsons with the kids and then had a bit of a boogie to some Halloween themed music. Once some very tired little monsters were in bed i spend the night watching a scary movie. The movie i watched was called Quarantine. I have seen it before but i like it and i still jumped just as much as the first time i watched it.
I hope everyone elses Halloween was as fun as ours.
If you are hoping to see nice cute Halloween cupcakes then you won’t be finding them on this particular post. Infact, this post and these cupcakes are definitely not for the faint hearted. If you are looking for gross cupcakes featuring blood, gore and severed body parts then you are in the right place….Welcome.
Don’t say you weren’t warned. You chose to ignore the warning signs!
(Vanilla cupcake with vanilla buttercream and topped with a fondant icing sign).
You could clearly see there had been some kind of struggle.
( Vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream, topped with a fondant icing knife and drizzled in blood)
of course it’s not real blood…..honest!
You found evidence of something quite gruesome when you found these severed digits.
(Vanilla cupcake with vanilla buttercream, topped with a fondant icing finger)
So quite clearly you should have known, it was only a matter of time before you came across the
ZOMBIES!!!!!!!!
I am really going to miss these guys!
All packaged nice and secure inside a cupcake box, ready to be delivered to my brother and his wife. These cupcakes are an early Halloween surprise, hope they like them.
I have been doing some searching around the internet, trying to find some good ideas for Halloween food and drink. These are my favourite finds so far.
This one looks gross, perfect for gruesome kids.
For lots more recipes and great ideas visit Foodnetwork.co.uk
The following were all found at Our Best Bites Take a look at the site, there are lots of great ideas.
How about these fantastic Dark Chocolate graveyard pots perfect to finish any Halloween dinner.
I am really looking forward to Halloween, even more so now that i have a few good ideas for the food and drink. I hope this post proves to be useful to you. Have a great Halloween.
Remember to keep checking back as i will be updating this page as i come across any new recipes of interest.
Well after making those deliciously scrummy Pumpkin and Ginger cupcakes the other day, I decided i wanted to make use of all of the pumpkin. First i put the pumpkin seeds to one side ( I have plans for these but that will be in another post, sometime soon). I then turned my attention to the pumpkin and decided instead of throwing it away, it might be fun to have a go at carving it. This also doubled up as a good excuse to have a practice before Halloween aswell ( I won’t tell anybody if you don’t). I didn’t want to do the usual face on a pumpkin and i wanted to try something different. After finding some really cool sites on the internet with fantastic pumpkins that really are out of this world, I decided to do my favourite *cough* err i mean my children’s favourite cartoon character. Yes you guessed it, he lives in a pineapple under the sea, so why not also be carved out of a pumpkin……Spongebob. This was my first time carving a pumpkin in this way, usually I just cut out triangles for eyes, a triangle nose and a mouth, not very imaginative I know but hey. So as you can see this was going to be a lot different to norm and quite a challenge, although I always love a challenge. I think it took somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 hours to complete but i am happy with the result. It is a little bit rough here and there (which probably comes from not having the proper equipment and having to improvise by using a chopping knife). Also i made a few mistakes but on the whole i love it…….I think i may have just found myself another hobby!
This is the finished carved pumpkin.
and this is the effect with a tea light placed inside, then lit and the lights turned off.
Here are some interesting pumpkin related websites that you may wish to visit.
http://www.pumpkincarving101.com
This next site is called Extreme Pumpkins and is one of my favourite sites and not a cute pumpkin to be seen anywhere. You have been warned. It was here at extreme pumpkins that i first saw my all time favourite…..the pukin pumpkin designed by Tom Nardone who is also the creator of the extreme pumpkins website.
Since creating the website Tom has also written 3 books, head on over to the extreme pumpkin website and take a look for yourselves.
http://www.extremepumpkins.com
Here is a site that has some free pumpkins carving patterns
Whilst I am still feeling in the spirit of Halloween, I thought I would have a trial run at making some Graveyard/gravestone themed cupcakes. These are vanilla cupcakes with a green coloured vanilla buttercream piped to look like grass. The gravestones are made out of fondant/sugarpaste icing. I will definitely be making more of these, I love how they turned out.
I like how this darker picture has an eerie feel to it.
A closer look at one of the icing gravestones.
Well as we are heading into my favourite two seasons Autumn and Winter I can’t help but smile. As the nights are slowly drawing in and the weather is cooling off it makes me think about the best few months we still have to come, October, November and December (which also just happen to be my personal favourites). First we have October which hosts Halloween and I always really love baking cupcakes and cakes for Halloween, themed of course. The year before last I made a severed head on a platter cake that actually came to be totally by accident. I was going to make a pumpkin cake and decorate it so it looked like a scary carved pumpkin or one of the pukin pumpkins as seen on this extreme pumpkin site. If you get chance take a peek, it is very cool in my opinion and well worth a look. Anyway I made my cake, filled and stacked it and then for some reason unbeknown to me and almost out of nowhere with no prior warning, my cake started to slide backwards! So I did the only rational thing I could think of at the time to save my cake, I grabbed a dowel and stuck it straight through the middle of my cake so it didn’t slide anymore. As I stood back looking at my poor cake looking all misshapen, ruined and with a plastic cake dowel sticking out of the top, I was feeling really gutted and wondering what the hell I was going to do now. Now and again I have the odd cake disaster where I just need a bit of quick thinking and a slight change to the original plan for the cake and once again it looks great. However on this occasion I really couldn’t see how I could ever make it good, so I did what I usually do in any crisis, swore until I very nearly did make the air turn blue and then I had a cup of tea. After 10 minutes or so I went back to my cake and took a long hard look at it. My poor brain was working over time, I just kept looking at the cake, thinking of a Halloween cake and wondering what I could do. Just when I was about to start again from scratch and bake another cake it suddenly came to me. If I added a few features here and there I could make my cake disaster into a severed head, perfect for Halloween. Everything was edible, the head was cake and the vegetables, eyeballs, fingers, ear and knife were made out of fondant/sugarpaste icing. Here is the finished cake.
Halloween dinner is served or should I say severed muahahahah. On the menu this Halloween is a severed head on a bed of cabbage. Served with mushrooms, tomatoes, pea pods and corn on the cob (with a knob of butter). Also included as a side order are severed fingers and ears for you to enjoy at your leisure. Enjoy your meal.
I am still thinking about what to do this year, so far a severed arm cake maybe been nibbled by a chocolate rat is a strong contender but we will see.
Sweet Sassy Cakes 