Halloween 2011 Dessert Menu

I have a huge sweet tooth.  I don't just like sugar.  I like the ridiculously rich desserts.  The ones most people don't want more than a bite or two of.  I love cheesecakes and ganaches and mousses and brownies and frostings.  My favorite dessert ever is from a restaurant in New Jersey called Old Man Rafferty's.  They have 3 locations throughout the state, but most notably one in New Brunswick where I went to college.  I'm glad I didn't find them earlier than I did, or I might have gained twice as much weight in college as I did.  They are known for their desserts, you can actually just go in and get dessert.  And the cakes if you want to call them that are huge.  They have a big display cabinet with everything right there to see all the time.  If you would like to torture yourself the dessert menu can be seen here.  My all time favorite is the Vesuvius cake.  It's a brownie topped with caramel, then cheesecake, then mousse, then ganache.  And every plate is topped with more sauce and real whipped cream.  So you see what I mean when I have a sweet tooth.  Dessert at any party is more important to me than whatever food I may be serving.  Last year I went waaaaaay overboard when it came to desserts.  Here's the dessert table.

We will start left to right I guess to keep it simple.  First we have a large collection of apothecary jars. I got the 3 jars on the left online from Sears last year.  They were about $30 for all 3. The tall skinny one in the back has skeleton fingers.  They are from the candy mold that can be seen in my shopping adventure here.  I bought them at Joann last year and Michael's this year.  They are reusable, I am a just a mess and decided buying a new $2 mold was easier than doing dishes.  You just put pretzel rods in the mold and pour the melted chocolate over it.  They fit really well in that tall skinny jar.  The jar in the center has Candy Corn M&Ms.  They were evidently only available at Walmart last year, but I've already seen them at Target and Walmart this year.  They are reallllly sweet.  They are white chocolate with a candy coating.  I probably won't be buying them again.  The glass pumpkin is full of regular candy corn.  I will only buy Brach's.  I just think it tastes better.  I got the pumpkin at Walmart 2 years ago for about $5.  The bottom jar has Reese's pieces in it.  I got the jar at Kroger 2 year ago.  The last item was definitely the biggest hit at the party last year.  It's a recipe I tried from the Brown Eyed Baker.  It's Leftover Halloween Candy Bark.  It's white chocolate drizzled over dark chocolate bark with Reese's Pieces, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Heath Bar, and Butterfingers.  I believe the recipe calls for some nuts too, but I left them out.  It was pretty amazing.  And I had none left at the end of the night because what wasn't eaten was taken home by other guests.  It's also pretty easy, there's some prep work cutting everything up, but it's melt chocolate, spread out, sprinkle candy, and drizzle white chocolate.

 
I had seen some really cute witch hat ideas for food last year.  The one I thought looked the most like witches' hats were ones with chocolate ice cream cones.  I could not actually find them, so I had to buy regular ice cream sugar cones.  I used a can of store bought icing and put it in a plastic sandwich bag, snipped a corner off, and used it like a piping bag.  I "glued" the cone to a store bought sugar cookie and added a Reese's piece as like a buckle on the band of the hat.  I had filled the cones up with more Reese's pieces before "gluing" it down.  It was supposed to be a surprise, like the Mr. Cone Head Sundae at Friendly's.  They looked cute, but no one really wants to just eat an ice cream cone by itself.  So I still had quite a few at the end of the night.

I got this cupcake stand from my mom for Easter last year and it took me all the way until Halloween to finally get to use it.  So I had to make cupcakes.  I usually "cheat" and use box mix for cupcakes.  I make chocolate cupcakes with vanilla icing that I dyed orange.  I use the Wilton gel food colors to get the brightest color.  I used Reese's Peanut Butter cups to make bats.  Their bodies were the small sized cups (not the new minis) and the wings were one big cup cut in half.  I added two orange icing dots for eyes.  They were kind of a mess and the bats kept falling off the cupcakes.  So I bought the spider picks for my cupcakes to keep it simpler.  

 

In front of the cupcakes it one of the easiest things to make, but it came out pretty awesome, and looked good too.  It's Candy Corn Fudge.  I'm not really sure where I found the recipe, but it was a bag of white chocolate chips and a can of vanilla icing.  The white chocolate chips are melted and mixed with the icing.  But I did it in 3 batches so I could make one batch yellow, one batch orange, and leave the last one white.  I lined an 8x8 pan with aluminum foil, so it was easier to get out of the pan.  The mix between the icing and the chocolate comes out kind of like play-dough, so you have to work it into the pan.  I scored it into 1 by 1 inch squares and placed a piece of candy corn inside each one.  I put it in the fridge until it was set and then cut it into the scored squares and put it back in the fridge until it was served.  This was one of the other things that people really liked. 

I made candy apple cake pops...but they were a disaster.  The idea sounded really cool, a cake pop dipped in chocolate and then dipped in caramel, and then dipped in nuts.  There was no apple in it what-so-ever.  It started off bad when I forgot to put the eggs in the cake mix.  It actually didn't taste that bad, just extra sweet.  Then I mixed it in with icing and it was sugar overload.  It was a huge mess. 

I also made chocolate covered spiders.  I made them the year before last too.  I don't think I'll be making them again this year, they got a little soggy.  They are chow mein noodles dropped in melted chocolate and formed into clumps to look like spiders.  Then I used red mini M&Ms for eyes.  They were in the fridge for too long and the noodles just got soggy.

All the way in the back is a plate of pumpkin fudge.  I found the recipe here.  It was good, but it was awfully sweet.  So much you only wanted one piece.  And the recipe makes a 13x9 pan.  So that's a lot of fudge.  It was also ridiculously hard to make.  You needed a candy thermometer and there was a lot of hot waiting over the stove.  It was rather sad, because it was so much work, and most of it got thrown away in the end because no one wanted nearly that much. 

Last is cheesecake.  Always a hit.  I made my usual cheesecake recipe, which is from Hershey's and is super simple and easy.  You can find it here.  It's the cheesecake 5 ways, in the most normal plain way.  The only thing I do differently is add an extra teaspoon of vanilla.  To make it special for Halloween I drizzled chocolate in the shape of a spiderweb and then placed one of the chocolate covered spiders on top.