When Recipes Attack: Potluck Carmel Apples

 

Everyone who cooks knows that sometimes things go wrong in the kitchen.  Sometimes, we can figure out why.  "Oh yeah, I did leave out the salt."  Sometimes, the recipe we follow is at fault (I find mistakes in lots of online recipes).  Sometimes we don't know what happened.  I always try to salvage cooking mistakes, especially ones with expensive ingredients or ingredients I don't use a lot, but sometimes you can't.

Today was a day when I'm not sure what happened, but I managed to salvage it.  I wanted to make caramel apples for a potluck tomorrow.  I've made caramel apples before, but I saw a recipe on a blog that used maple syrup and sounded delicious.  Since I've made them before, I decided to try it and I didn't plan a back up recipe.  Big mistake!   Using a new recipe for a potluck is a bad idea.

Anyway, I followed the instructions and yum, it looked delicious, but I did kind of thing it used a lot of butter.  I didn't think it would ever come together, but it eventually did.

However, even after cooling for hours, this is what my apples looked like.

 

Nothing I would ever bring to a potluck.  Yuck!  It just never got thick enough.  I even put it in the fridge and it was still sloshy.  I sliced this one and ate it.  The caramel tasted divine.  I didn't want to throw it away (plus, I don't normally keep sugar or flour around, so I didn't have anything else to make without going to to the store). 

It was like this was destined to happen.  My mom just bought me a crockpot with three bowls (for dips) last month.  I hadn't even opened it yet.  Since the caramel was a great dip, I decided to crack that baby open and put caramel in two bowls and some warm water with a squirt bottle to drizzle chocolate in the other. I filled one of my fall bowls with peanuts and I was set.

The real problem with this idea is that the apples need to be sliced and sliced apples turn brown.  I think everyone knows the trick to squirt lemon juice (yucky flavor) or lime juice (better flavor) on them to prevent them from turning.  I use citric acid.  I can and make cheese, so I always have a little citric acid on hand.  It's a powder.  If you dissolved a teaspoon in a cup of water, you can just soak the apples that liquid for a minute or two and they won't brown for a few days, give or take.  In my experience, it works better than lemon or lime juice (the citric acid is what makes those citric fruits work too).  I think because I literally dunk the entire slice in it and I never really have enough lime juice to do that. Plus, I can't taste the citric acid on the apples at all.  If you lick the actual powder, it tastes like a lemon.  The use it sour candy for the sour flavor.

Dual Tone Spooky Cakes: Quick Halloween Idea

This bundt cake looks a little a ghost.

I used to make rainbow cupcakes when I was a kid, similar to these.  We would get bowls of cake mix and dye them colors and make a big mess, but they'd turn out cute anyway.  I was reminded of this the other day when I surfing the web and saw a black and orange cake.  The author made black cakeballs and put them in the middle of a cake pan.  She then covered the balls with batter and baked it.  It made very neat circles in her cake.  Mine are more random, but I think they look sort of oozy and spooky.

This is a simple half/half dual tone cupcake

For these, I separate my cake batter and dye each part a different a color, but you could use separate cake batters too.  In the cupcake, I dyed one half of a vanilla cake batter orange and the other half black.  For the bundt cake, I used one of those "12 cupcake" devil's food mixes for the black, and a whole white cake mix separated in half.  I dyed one half green and the other half orange.  The cupcakes require a little finer hand.  You spoon one color into your cupcake pan, then put the next color down.  You can swirl them if you want.  If you use a piping bag, you can get intricate layers by piping a small amount in the middle of your paper cups and piping the same amount of the next color on top of that layer and repeating (that works well with rainbow cupcakes).

The cake is a lot easier, even if you want to make intricate layers, but it's the same concept.  You can do as many layers as you want, or just make one black spot in the middle, etc.  This would be a fun activity for kids.  The rainbow ones are awesome for Easter.

The icing for the cupcakes was just a can of icing dyed orange.  For the bundt, a regular icing wouldn't be drippy enough.  I made a glaze and dyed it in two colors.  Here's the recipe for the glaze.

Check out that owl platter. Isn't it adorable? I love Halloween.

Bundt Glaze:
4 ounces softened cream cheese
1 to 2 tablespoons milk
2 cups powdered sugar

1. Blend all the ingredients together in a food processor, mixer or blender.  I normally start out with 1 tablespoon of milk and add to my desired consistency.
2. If the glaze is too thin, add more sugar.  If it's too thick, add more milk.

Once you blend it, you can separate it, dye it your colors and drip it on in whatever pattern you want.  You have to wait until your cake is cooled or it will all melt off and not look pretty at all.

Halloween Costumes: The Same but Much Less Awesome

This costume is from the 1950s. I'm not that old.
But, most of my costumes where this type.

I work a Halloween event year that requires me to judge a kid's costume contests.  Last night, as I was saying to kids, "I was [character] when I was younger" I suddenly realized that kid's costumes haven't changed. 

This will be telling my age, but I saw all sorts of characters from my youth last night.  There was a Strawberry Shortcake, several Star Wars characters, Yoshi and Mario and a My Little Pony.  Most others were classic characters like Spiderman and other superheros, the Wizard of Oz, cowboys, army men, police, zombies and aliens.  There were a few modern characters.  No Hannah Montanas so far this year, but she was popular a few years back.  There was a Commander Cody, some of the Incredibles.  It just seems like modern characters don't stand the test of time.

Some of my memorable Halloween costumes as a kid were some of the same costumes I saw last night.  The first costume I remember was either ET or Casper (I can't remember which came first).  I haven't seen anyone as ET in a long time, and I don't think Casper would be popular these days.  I was Firefly, the My Little Pony, one year.  I was Princess Leia.  I was Scooby Doo (I see a lot of Scooby Doos today).  One year I was a punk rocker.  Rockers are common today, but I was inspired by Jem and Holograms (I was truly outrageous).  I'm sure no little girls have even heard of Jem today.  I can't believe the Ninja Turtles are still popular.  I wanted to be Michaelangelo, but mom said it was for boys.  That still makes me mad. 

Then vs Now

The biggest difference I see is the quality of the costumes.  The costumes we used to wear were far from creative.   Most of them were the plastic masks with the plastic "apron" costume that had the show logo plastered across it.   Kids today wear makeup rather than masks.  The My Little Pony I saw was not exactly like the one pictured.  She had a wig with a unicorn horn and purple makeup.  If kids of my day had had Angry Birds, we would have had plastic masks.  The Angry Birds this year were wearing makeup and feather hats.

Back in the day, I remember not being able to see well out of those hard plastic masks.  At the end of the night, the mask would have made an imprint in your face.  The string would have cut into the back of your head (or broken).  In general, those aprons would rip or tear before the night was over.  We didn't care.  We had candy.  We expected to walk in horrible, painful costumes for it.  That's probably why kid's are such pansies today.  Seriously, you have to be able to see to cross the street? Please!  You want to be comfortable on Halloween? Whatever.  We had to work for our treats.

You guys may steal my generation's costumes, but you'll never steal our awesomeness.  Strawberry Shortcake isn't quite the same without the plastic mask.  Ok, even as a kid I called BS on Strawberry Shortcake.  She's a human (kind of).  I'm a human (kind of).  Why do I need a mask to be a human?  I wore the costume anyway, but even I knew it was weird.  I guess it was easier than keeping a wig and hat on kids.  We were still awesome.

This is what a REAL costume looked like.