Eat, Drink, & Be Scary!
This past weekend, my twin and I cooked up a storm in her kitchen making Halloween-esque desserts to share with our friends. It was so much fun but so exhausting. While I am not a big baker myself, I always have fun when I’m with other people, whether it be friends or my mom.
The first item on the agenda to make was white chocolate blackberry cheesecake bars. My mom had made raspberry bars a couple weeks earlier, and I was dying to try the recipe for myself. To give it a spookier feel, I substituted the raspberries for blackberries. (Alex wanted to add orange food coloring to the white filling but we forgot to buy some when we went grocery shopping.)
We made the bars first because they had to chill in the fridge for a few hours before being served. I really enjoyed making this recipe because it didn’t need a springform pan. We just used a square baking pan and put down parchment paper to eventually pull the bars out when we served them.
The finished product was absolutely gorgeous and so tasty. I enjoyed eating these bars rather than traditional cheesecake because the bars were practically finger food. The crust was just crumbled Oreos mixed with butter. I definitely plan on making this recipe again.
If you would like to make these yourself, click here for the recipe!
Next, Alex and I made banana bread. It wasn’t on our list of desserts to make, but Alex found out her bananas were turning bad. So I texted my mom asking for a banana bread recipe and lo and behold: my mom had a good recipe. We added chocolate chips to the batter, and when I told Alex the measurement for chocolate chips, in so many words, she told me: “you don’t measure chocolate by a number—you measure that shit with your heart.”
Yeah, she’s right.
And the bread came out great, but I only had a small portion to eat because it was so sweet.
Also, while I’m pretty careful when in the kitchen, there was one casualty: my forearm. When I was turning the bread pan in the oven, my forearm accidentally touched the wire rack. Talk about ouch!
With the banana bread in the oven, Alex and I moved onto the dark chocolate Halloween chip cookies… or as I called them, the monster cookies. Now, as an inexperienced baker, I didn’t know how many cookies this recipe was going to yield. But as I was looking at the batter in the mixer—with an unholy amount of peanut butter chips, white chocolate chips, and semi-sweet chocolate chips—I told Alex that we probably should have halved the recipe due to the insane amount of cookies this was going to make. Her response? “Oh, I knew this was going to happen when I saw the recipe called for a cup of butter.” (My twin loves cookies, if you couldn’t tell.)
For the cookies that turned out great and didn’t break when I took them off the baking sheet, I bagged them to hand them out to my friends (because who can really eat 30+ cookies?!).
If you’d like to make these cookies yourself, here is the recipe!
While I was working on the cookies, Alex worked on making my grandma’s recipe of spiced pecans. She mixed everything together, and then I was in charge of putting them in the oven when it was available. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the recipe fully and the pecans burned slightly. They’re still edible and don’t taste horrible, but I’m annoyed at myself that I messed up. Guess that just means I’ll have to make them some other time!
(I forgot to take a picture of the spiced pecans—oops!)
Every Saturday, Alex holds a martial arts class, so around 1:45pm she left me to my devices while she taught class in her backyard. I finished up the monster cookies and bagged them and put the spiced pecans in the oven.
The last recipe I did was a variation of my twin’s churro chips recipe. The original recipe calls for buttered soft tortillas covered with a cinnamon and sugar mix, baked for 8–10 minutes at 350° in the oven. Normally we just cut the tortilla into strips, but I saw a recipe that used a cookie cutter to make bat-shaped churro chips! So, of course, I had to buy some Halloween-themed cookie cutters, and I made my own bat churro chips!
Unfortunately, my phone—which had my timer—died while the bats were in the oven. It wasn’t until someone asked about the churro chips that I bolted from the table to the kitchen, put on an oven mitt, and yanked open the oven door. Don’t worry, there was no smoke, and the bats weren’t even black or anything, but they definitely were on the crispy side.
Clearly my twin is the one who really should do the baking. (Although we do have a system where she cooks and I clean.)
One food I wanted to make that I never got around to was ghost strawberries—strawberries dipped in white chocolate with dark chocolate eyes and mouths. I had bought the fruit, but since I didn’t get to it, they were eaten as a palette cleanser during tea time.
And that leads me to the fruits of my and Alex’s labor: being able to share the desserts with our friends. After Alex’s martial arts class ended, everyone came inside and we had tea time. Alex made tea (mine my pomegranate flavored), and we passed around the desserts and had a nice time chatting and laughing.
It’s moments like these that make me ache for pre-COVID normalcy. The holidays—whether spooky or not—are times to have fun with your friends. To talk and to laugh and to break bread (or white chocolate blackberry cheesecake bars) with one another.
If you try any of the above mentioned recipes, or have a recipe you love to make during this spooky season, email me and let me know!
Bone Appetit!