My Favorite Holiday

I love Halloween! It's my favorite holiday. You get to dress up in silly costumes and eat sweets without feeling stupid or guilty (respectively). Because Halloween fell mid-week, I got to celebrate it twice! Once with my friend Katy and her flatmates--it was a Halloween party crossed with a birthday party for Katy's flatmate Lucy. The invitation said come in fancy dress (that's British for come in costume) or come dressed as Lucy. So I decided to try out a costume I've been wanted to do for a few years: Lucille Ball. I found a close to perfect Lucy dress at a charity shop near me. The pearls and pumps were mine already. The real effort was getting my wavy red hair curly and pinned up (I think I used over 30 bobby pins!) The party was good fun even if I don't think any of the Brits there knew "I Love Lucy."

Left: Me. Right: Lucille Ball.
(In case I look so perfectly like her you couldn't tell us apart!)

After my Lucy costume I felt quite a bit of pressure for my costume the next week for my party. The way to top that was to use my puppy, Stella. So we decided (okay I decided) that I'd be Amy Pond and she'd be the Doctor. (If you don't know who these people are, you really must watch "Doctor Who.") Amy is a redhead (or as they call them here, a ginger) so again, all I had to do was tweak my hair to make it nearly perfect--in this case it was much easier, all I had to do was straighten my hair. The costume was all clothes I own anyway, put together differently than I usually would. The difficult part was getting Stella to look like the Doctor. I knitted her a fez (yes, you read that right, I knitted a fez for my dog) and a bow tie (well a bow to attach to her collar to look like a bow tie.) She was not thrilled with either garment, but she looked so cute!

This might need a bit of an explanation. Obviously the photo on the left is
me and Stella as Amy and the Doctor. The top right is a BBC promo photo
of Amy and the Doctor (for those of you who don't know the show,
he does wear a fez on occasion even though he isn't sporting one here).
Bottom right, me, Matt Smith (who plays the Doctor) and Karen Gillian
(who plays Amy Pond) outside an UWS Mexican restaurant (I know this
isn't relevant to my Halloween party or costume, but isn't it cool?!).

Of course the real point of my party was not Stella in a fez--though that was excellent--it was the food! I was baking for a few people (including Katy) who know my work, but the majority of my guests had never tasted my baking before. It's always fun to bake for people who don't know me well enough to know how crazy I get (both from a quantity and quality perspective). The majority of my guests were from my course. It was nice getting to know everyone a bit better outside of school! (And everyone was quite happy to get to know Stella--I'm not sure her feet touched the ground all evening!)

I put out some real food, including my mom's homemade tatziki and her chickpea mash, plus sour cream and onion dip. Also chips, falafel, and veg to dip into them. I'll also whipped up a quick batch of cheese straws and put out a giant bowl of my spiced popcorn. I accidentally caramelized the sugar, spice and butter mixture, so it wasn't quite the usual for me. But it may have been better! Spiced caramel popcorn; what could be bad?!

Now, finally, to the good stuff. I made a simple cake (white cake with leftover chocolate and raspberry buttercreams between the layers) and decorated it like a mummy head. Okay a stylized mummy head. Topped with a stylized pumpkin (a cake dummy). I think it's a ton of fun, even if the flavors are a bit random. Of course a mummy wearing a pumpkin for a hat is a bit random too...

But one cake really isn't enough, so I made cheesecake as well. To be clear, this wasn't your good old New York cheesecake. It was a lovely icebox cheesecake recipe I found in Martha Stewart's new cookbook. The recipe calls for a chocolate wafer crust, but I couldn't find chocolate wafer cookies anywhere so I made chocolate shortbread cookies and used them. It worked well, but I think they were a bit buttery-er than I'd have liked.

The crust is then lined with chocolate ganache and, once that is set, it's filled up to the top with a beautiful cream cheese and heavy cream mixture. Martha suggests using left over ganache to draw a spider web on top (in the same fashion as my old Rhein de Saba cake). That didn't work. It set up too quickly and the cake was really too soft to run a knife through without just mushing around the filling. In the end, I really didn't like the spider web (a shame since it was for Halloween) and I used an offset spatula to swirl the ganache with the filling. It then froze beautifully and ended up with an elegant, nearly wood grain effect. Not what I was going for, but I was happy with it.

Remember the pumpkin, brown butter, sage loaf cake I said I wanted to make with a white chocolate glaze? Well I made it in a Pullman loaf pan, so it had lovely straight sides, and had every intention to make the white chocolate glaze I'd used on the marble loaf cake last winter. But I also had a banana, walnut, and coconut loaf cake to put out and I wanted to glaze that too. I decided that dark chocolate would be the way to go for that one and adapted the white chocolate glaze to be a dark chocolate glaze and slathered the banana bread with it. Well I didn't want to make the same glaze for the pumpkin cake (even if it was going to be white chocolate). So I whipped up a brown butter, sage glaze based on a brown butter glaze for cupcakes/mini pound cakes that I found in one of the Martha Stewart cookbooks I own. It was slightly thicker than a glaze but thinner than a frosting and it was beautifully speckled with bits of browned butter solids. I spread that on the pumpkin loaf and let it set up a bit at room temperature. I sliced both loaf cakes and put the pumpkin one on a nice tray and the banana bread on the dessert platter I was assembling.

The dessert platter started with the chocolate glazed banana, coconut, walnut loaf but it certainly didn't end there. I also made my favorite soft baked reverse chocolate chip cookies (modified from a Nigella Lawson recipe) and what are now my favorite peanut butter cookies. It's a recipe from baked that I've made before, but I guess I just did a better job this time (and I know the milk chocolate I used this time was much better quality), because they were much better! I also made some shortbread cookies. I figured since I was making them for the cheesecake crust anyway I'd double the recipe and make cookies. Before I pressed the dough into the pan for the cookies, I added some cinnamon, nutmeg, and chili power. I thought spiced chocolate shortbread would be nice.

It's hard to tell but the sugar on top is dyed orange. I found out
how to do this online and I promise I'll tell you about it soon.

Everything went over swimingly. I think the sour cream and onion dip was the favorite for the Americans at the table (we made it with proper Lipton onion soup mix) but the tatziki was the favorite for the non-Americans. Personally, it was a toss up for me. Also the popcorn was a bit hit.

On the sweet side of things, the tiered cake was, hands down, the favorite in the looks department. The peanut butter cookies were incredibly popular, as was the pumpkin loaf (people were quite impressed that sage worked so nicely in a dessert--honestly, I was too the first time I made this.) Everyone who had room by the time I sliced the cheesecake complemented me on the texture of it. They were all amazed at how creamy and (almost) light it was. I suppose that's really down to it being an icebox cheesecake rather than a baked one. As for all the other desserts, they certainly weren't unpopular--I had to bring out seconds of pretty much everything!

Now I couldn't just send all these lovely people home empty handed, so I made little goodie bags of Halloween shaped sugar cookies. These got rave reviews in class on Monday!

Boo!