Stab Victim Cake

Poor Chris. When he left his home factory, we can assume that he must have been quite sure that he was going to spend his life as a jolly gigantic gingerbread man. And then, by some sinister and cruel blow of fate he was shipped to my house. Where he now spends his time being killed. Over. And over. Again.

Mwuahahahahahahah!

:D

Ahem. Anyway, I am really going for the Hallowe’en thing today. No, I have not decorated the house. But we’re having a kind of party – our horror film club gang is coming round and we’re watching John Carpenter’s original Halloween. Obvious choice. And we’re having Stab Victim Cake! We’re not dressing up though. Dressing up is for Eurovision parties, duh.

Today, Chris is a pumpkin and peanut butter cake decorated with three different kinds of chocolate, some coloured sugar icing, blue sprinkles, a bit of rose hip jam, and a shard made from mint candies. I am posting the cake recipe below for your convenience. The cake is lovely when baked in a rectangular tin, iced with dark chocolate and served as squares. It’s lovely and rather cool when used to bake Chris* the Dead Guy. :D

* All characters appearing in this cake are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
That is to say, I am not ritually killing my dear friend’s husband or my sports trainer or anybody else I know who’s called Chris. Chris the Dead Guy is called Chris because he was my first shark attack victim. It all makes sense now, doesn’t it? Of course you know that in Jaws, the first shark victim is called Chrissie.

Pumpkin and peanut butter cake

Ingredients
200 g pumpkin
2 eggs
250 g peanut butter, at room temperature
200 g sugar
50 g ground peanuts
5 tbsp milk
150 g flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 pinch salt

Method
Grate and/or chop the pumpkin into tiny little pieces. Separate the eggs.

Beat peanut butter and 150 g sugar with an electric whisk for about 2 minutes. Add the egg yolks one after another, keep beating. Then add the ground peanuts and the milk, stir them in carefully. Sift and fold in the flour and the baking powder.
Whip the egg whites, slowly adding the remaining 50 g sugar, until very stiff.
Fold stiff egg whites and pumpkin into the batter, alternating, 1 tbsp each at a time.

Bake at 180°C for about 30 minutes.

A dark chocolate icing goes very well with it.

 

 

Update:

Husband took the crime scene pictures! :)

 

Spider Biscuits

Happy Hallowe’en all around!

Having lived in Germany for the past few years, I’ve watched this holiday emerge here, and I’ve always been very sceptical. You see, there’s no Hallowe’en tradition here. It’s only been introduced quite recently by companies selling chocolate/candy/costumes/… and, well, call me old-fashioned but it all just seems too commercial for my taste. (There are traditional holidays around this time of the year here, but they are celebrated in a very, very different kind of way; pumpkins and costumes and candy are nothing to do with it at all.)

But this year I realised what a great baking occasion Hallowe’en is, and since I am not selling my stuff, my Hallowe’en is not commercial. :)

I made these biscuits for the kids in the family. They are filled with peanut butter and chocolate, a combination that seems so American to me that I thought it was appropriate. :) The spiders on top are dark chocolate, and they were MUCH harder to do than I had anticipated. And I don’t think I’ve emphasised the “much” enough in that sentence. I seriously struggled with the melted chocolate, and you can see from the picture below that some biscuits have mutant spiders on them. But then that goes with the whole Hallowe’en theme again, doesn’t it?