Spooky Dessert Night!

Given that this past Tuesday was so close to Halloween and I've been reading about cute spooky desserts all month, I decided that I should have a Halloween themed Dessert Night! We of course had to do the traditional activity of carving pumpkins so this was a BYOP (Bring Your Own Pumpkin) event.




I also learned that J has never had a caramel apple before!! I was shocked as they are one of my favorite sweet things. Every time I'm home in Carmel, CA, I go to Pieces of Heaven in the Barnyard because they have a wonderful assortment of caramel apples ranging from the most basic caramel apple to crazy caramel apples that have chocolate sauce, marshmellows, nuts and chocolate chips. So good! So I had to introduce J to a caramel apple (though he still hasn't eaten one because they took so long to set after coating them...it's a work in progress). Check out the tasty apples that we made.


Now for the desserts! I had a VERY hard time deciding between all of the really cute spooky desserts that I heard about. I finally settled on Vampire Cupcakes and Spooky Halloween Cookie Bars mainly because the Vampire Cupcakes were just too cute, and I really wanted an excuse to eat the lime green and purple (my favorite colors) M&Ms that were required for the cookie bars.


I totally cheated and made the Vampire Cupcakes with cupcake mix, canned cherry pie filling, and premade frosting, but it was really the final effect that mattered. You can see the "blood" oozing out of the middle of the cupcake here.

The Spooky Halloween Cookie Bars turned out great despite the fact that I was definitely not reading the recipe carefully when I was making them and thus made a lot of mistakes. First of all, I put the whole amount of flour into the batter at the beginning instead of reserving some for the white cookie layer on top that you make later. To fix this, I added additional flous to the white cookie mixture and hoped for the best. Next, I didn't combine the melted butter and the cocoa powder before adding it to the dough. Actually, I thought the recipe required 1 1/3 cups of cocoa powder instead of just 1/3 cup. So after dumping all of that cocoa powder in there (luckily I hadn't really mixed yet), I had to dump it back out and start over combining the cocoa powder with the melted butter. Luckily, whatever I did seems to have made the cookies better. They were so tasty!!! I can't even begin to explain and, despite all of the sugar and candy in them, they weren't that sweet.


All in all, it was a really fun Halloween themed Dessert Night.