By Brooke Rees
This Halloween season, I’ve primarily been cooking up an anxiety disorder, but I’ve also spent some time in the kitchen. Now that I live in an apartment and not my parent’s basement, I have to pretty much feed myself for every single meal. I won’t pretend the novelty of being in the kitchen hasn’t worn off slightly when it’s 7:30 AM and I’m late for work and all I have to pack for lunch is a solitary slice of ham and a yogurt (I guess this is Keto?), but I am still enjoying whipping up some holiday treats.
A while back, my mom got me a few Halloween presents (I’m an only child), which fed into this most recent batch of baking and cooking obsessions. She got me a skull-shaped baking tin, straight off of every Christian Girl Autumn’s Pinterest board, some Halloween sprinkles, and a skull-patterned rolling pin. Now the baking tin was versatile. I could go sweet or savory and I scoured the internet for possible recipes. Most of the savory dishes included some type of pizza, but at this point in my life I am over the fantasy that any kind of homemade pizza could ever compete with a restaurant-produced one.
Consequently, I decided to follow the bread crumbs to the Gingerbread house and take the sweet (and a little spooky) path. Though skull brownies did not pop up in my cursory Google search, the idea hit me like a ton of chocolate chips, and I set out to find the best recipe. I settled on this one, from Love and Lemons. Though skull shaped tins are not mentioned, I plopped the batter in and they turned out amazing. These brownies are fudgy and chewy, with the added bonus that the skull shape provides for a lot of those coveted brownie edges!
After the brownies proved successful, I thought it was time to test out some of the other baking goodies. I made some sugar cookies using this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction. For those who don’t know, Sally is basically the Beyoncé of the Baking world. Well no. I feel like Beyoncé is still the Beyoncé of any world, but Sally could be one of the really cool back-up dancers in this scenario. Things were going smoothly. My cookies held their shape nicely and smelled delicious, and all I had to do was dye my royal icing and get to decorating. That is when I discovered my error in buying ~organic~ food dye from Whole Foods. Instead of producing the definitely-can’t-be-safe-for-human-consumption neon colors I was used to, this natural dye simply would not yield an orange color. This is the one holiday where orange is essential. It needed its moment, and instead all I was getting was a newborn diarrhea colored brown. My roommate got in on the action and improvised, throwing in some of her red-colored water flavoring and saving the day. While the frosting now had a slight tropical taste, our pumpkin sugar cookies were looking good enough to ea- I mean... post on Instagram.
This article is dedicated to my cheap Target microwave, which, over the course of a single week, managed to set on fire an acorn squash, a potato, and produce soup so hot, when spilled onto my chest, it produced a second-degree burn. May my squash fire diminish, and may my own gourds heal.
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