Jeepers I thought I'd have more time and that I'd planned all the baking out quite nicely. I needed to make a carrot loaf for my mom's friend - ( who she has been staying with) and for my mom for her birthday! It's on the 9th, which is just after she gets back home, so we'll have a little family party here before she leaves.
My carrot cake recipe yields a huge amount of batter (yay!) so even after baking two generous loaves, I still had more than enough for a whole batch of cupcakes.
Then, I decided to make vanilla cupcakes for the bases for our trick-or-treat cupcakes. You know, when you visualize these things they seem so much easier in your mind, and you don't factor in things like interrupting children or emergency trips to the shop! I way-overfilled the cupcake holders because I ran out of child slaves to fetch me another baking tray to make extra cupcakes and I could not get up (back pain). This also meant the baking time was all wonky and I overbaked them. Somehow, they were still absolutely delicious!
This is also a very generous yield cupcake recipe! All things considered, my planning went pretty well. I bought all the base ingredients, for the carrot cakes and the vanilla cupcakes so at least I could get those baked and out of the way. Because I am still using the teeny tiny oven, this still meant only one tray at a time sigh so it still took me about two days: Wednesday and Thursday. Friday I took a break and then @zakludick bought me everything i needed for the toppings and filings of our cupcakes!
My mommy came over to help me and thank goodness I did. Saturday was chaos, trying to get everything ready while both Zak and @aimeludick were at work!
@merenludick baked his own potato salad!!! for the 1st time!
Anyway, back to the cakes, if you; 're looking for recipes, you can find them in my previous post here: Claire's Crazy Cakes, Bakes and Kitchen Hacks: Chapter 22 Double recipe Deliciousness: Rainbow Frosted Vanilla Cupcakes and Lemon Zest "Nut-free" Carrot Cupcakes
Once Mum came over, we battled a bit with the piping guns, as one uses metal nozzles while the other uses plastic nozzles and I forget every time! They take a little getting used to but are 100 times easier and less messy than pining bags. I'll never go back!
So, we made the icing for the white (what was planned to be ghosts but ended up being scary clown faces) and the orange and scary pumpkin faces. Of course, nothing went to plan!
I made the icing for the vanilla cupcakes by making a generous amount of buttercream icing. I then divided it in two and added yellow and red food coloring to get it to look as orange as possible.
We discovered we had less than a quarter left, which was still a hefty amount, of buttercream icing, so I added everything I needed for the carrot cake loaves and cupcakes to this. It worked out so well and gave a lovely gentle orange colour to them. We added some lemon zest and of course the cream cheese just made it perfect!
As for the faces, It looks like preschool kids did it 😂😂😂😂!!! Mom and I had a good laugh and got covered in icing though so it was all so worth it! Besides, when we brought them out, everyone identified them immediately! So yay?
They tasted absolutely delicious. The trick-or-treat aspect was that only one set of cupcakes got the absolutely delicious pure caramel filling. I don't want to tell you how many cupcakes I ate or how much icing accidentally ended up in my tummy … never mind the damaged cupcakes). but I'll be on a strict low-carb diet from now on, as Dr prescribed!
The point is that the cupcakes were delicious, everyone had a ball and ate way too much sugar and we had a ton of fun! I believe that's what the Halloween spirit is all about!
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