Halloween!

Halloween was a whirlwind week for me in a very unspectacular way. I had a lot of family issues come up unexpectedly and I had a cake order due on Halloween.

Halloween Cupcakes

Naturally I found time to bake a few extra things on top of the cake order. These cupcakes were pretty straight forward. Vanilla batter with chocolate icing. I just added some orange food coloring to the batter.

I almost forgot to say these are mini cupcakes! And they have super cute halloween cupcake liners with bats on the bottom which I failed to get a shot of.

Cake Order

A friend of a friend put me in contact for this cake order. This is a red velvet cake with chocolate icing. The request was fairly simple. A black cake with webbing and spiders on top. The spiders are sculpted from fondant and the webs on top of the cake are made from vanilla bark. 

I was fairly pleased with the out turn of the cake considering the time constraint I was under. They said the cake was wonderful and that they loved it but you never really know what people are thinking...

Chocolate Dipped Apples

I also made candied apples. I'm not really into caramel so I made chocolate dipped apples instead.

Lucky me, the apples were on sale so I bought a variety. Red apples, granny smith and gala apples. I inserted short bamboo skewers instead of using lollipop or popsicle sticks. They were much easier to insert but may want to be careful with kids. The ends are very sharp. I dipped the apples in chocolate bark and let them cool. Chocolate bark hardens much quicker than using chocolate chips and in my experience is much easier to work with. 

I then poured the white chocolate into a zip lock bag and cut off the corner. The bigger the cut the bigger the drizzle. This is the fun part as the messier it is the better! After you drizzle each apple immediately sprinkle on your nuts or they chocolate will be too dry or the nuts to stick. I meant to drizzle on caramel as well to keep true to tradition but I completely forgot! Whoops. You could also reverse this and do milk chocolate on top of white.

Ingredients

1 pkg vanilla bark

1 pkg chocolate bark

1 pkg chopped nuts 

10 - 12 small apples

short bamboo skewers

parchment paper

cookie sheet

heavy duty ziploc bag, sandwich size

Directions

Wash and remove stems from apples then place on large cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. The parchment paper will prevent the chocolate from sticking to anything.

Make sure your apples are totally dry or your chocolate will slip off. Insert skewers into center of each apple.

Melt chocolate bark in microwave safe bowl (deep enough to dip 3/4 of apple in) for thirty second intervals. Do not over warm or your chocolate will scald and harden. 

Dip each apple into melted chocolate and place back onto cookie sheet to cool.

Melt white chocolate bark in a microwave safe bowl. You should only need about 4 pieces of chocolate depending on how much or little you would like to drizzle onto your apples. Once melted pour your white chocolate into a heavy duty sandwich size ziploc bag. Cut the tip, again according to how much or little chocolate you would like to drizzle. 

After drizzling each apple immediately sprinkle on nuts, or sprinkles or any other topping you would like to so that they will stick. Then again place on the cookie sheet to cool.