Pumpkin and Spice

I love Halloween. I love vampires (though not so much Twilight-y vampires...) In honor of the holiday, and my beloved gothy bloodsuckers, I created a bloody cheesecake for our Halloween party this year.

A hazelnut flavored cheesecake with a red chambord (raspberry liqueur) flavored swirl is topped with with a "bloody" splash of frangelico spiked raspberry coulis. The flavor is smooth, rich and creamy, and the sauce offers a tart, bright note. In fact, it's really lovely enough that if you left out the red food dye in the cheesecake, it would make a delightful dessert for any occasion.

I'm a big fan of the blog Cake Wrecks. The blog focuses on hilariously hideous professional cakes gone wrong. Ugly decorations, weird airbrushing, strange spelling mistakes... it's all there, and it's all so, so funny. It is everything I (as a professional baker) aspire not to be!

Every Sunday, though, Jen (the bloggeress), runs a feature called "Sweet Sundays". Every Sweet Sunday has a theme, and features beautiful, well-done cakes that reflect that theme. This week's theme was "The Undead Wed"- and the Goth wedding cake I made for my final project in my advanced cakes class was one of the featured cakes!

The Halloween party on Saturday was a smashing success! Everyone had such creative costumes- one of Kyle's friends and her boyfriend came as Medusa and Zeus! Check out her makeup job- she said it took her two hours!

It's Halloween! It's Halloween! Gaaaaaaahhhhh!... Sorry. I had to get that out of my system. Now since one of my favorite things about Halloween is costumes (and pumpkins and candy and creepy gothy home decor and...) I thought I'd share a little glimpse of Halloween costumes of years past. I'm a big ol' dork and love couples costumes, so these are Kyle and I as famous duos... and actually is a record of our every Halloween together...

Halloween 2004
Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable.
(If you're not familiar, it's a cartoon on the Disney channel about a teenage girl and her best friend, Ron, who are average high schoolers/crime fighting super spys. It's really a very witty and clever show.)

Okay, Halloween is tomorrow, and Iamsofreakingexcited! Gah! Kyle and I are having a Halloween party, but it's not until Saturday, which is okay, because November 1st is Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), which is equally creepy, and also involves candy and costumes.