Candy Salad and Devil's Food Affogato, and a Simple Halloween Menu

Didya miss me?  ;-)  It's very unlike me to be absent from the blog for long and to miss my usual weekly Monday midnight/Tuesday early morning posting time.  Alas-- however, this week, life just caught up with me, and I had to throw my hands up and just let something go.  It turns out that juggling concurrent classes and research at two universities simultaneously (not to mention the commute hours hopping back and forth across the San Francisco Bay) and attempting to squeeze two years' worth of graduate work into a single semester while still trying to maintain some semblance of sanity isn't such a hot idea.  Yeah.  But, don't worry about me--I'm having a ball doing it all (seriously) and absolutely love it.  I know.  I'm crazy.

But wait--you're going to think I'm even crazier when you see the recipe I'm going to try my hardest to convince you about today: candy salad.  (Boy, I sure hope your kids aren't reading this one, because you might hate me if they pick up on this idea!)  This was a completely accidental discovery on my part, but it's turned out to be an absolutely wonderful one.

Here's how it all started.  When one of our friends came over for our Halloween dinner, he brought along a bag of Skittles.  (My policy for Halloween parties is "I make the food, you bring the candy.")  Now, Skittles aren't my usual candy of choice.  In fact, I don't even remember the last time I had Skittles or voluntarily sought them out.  But there they were, a pail of them sitting on the kitchen table amongst the fixings for dinner.  So, as I was putting together the salad I was making, my hands instinctively hovered over the colorful bowl of candies, reached in, and tossed a few into the salad.  I'm no stranger to unusual and untraditional combinations of savory and sweet, but even I was skeptical at first about what I'd just done.  But the minute I took the first bite and sunk my teeth through the leafy greens and into a burst of chewy candy flavor, I was sold.  Skittles, it turns out, are the perfect finishing touch to a salad of spicy wild arugula leaves, accented with leaves of deeply fragrant purple basil, crunchy shaved fennel,  and nuggets of juicy pomegranate seeds.  Skittles contribute the final texture and flavor to tie everything together: the slight toothiness in the candy's center and the bright sweetness to balance out the herby taste of the fennel, arugula, and basil and slightest tart to enhance and highlight the sweetness of the pomegranate seeds.  The key, of course, is a small, light-handed sprinkling of Skittles--just enough so that it brings a bit of nuanced novelty and surprise to an otherwise straightforward autumn salad.

a Simple Halloween Menu

Candy salad

wild arugula, shaved fennel, purple basil leaves, pomegranate seeds, skittles

Garlic-baked chicken drumsticks

with paprika, fresh rosemary and thyme, lavender salt, and worchestershire

Sweet potato and squid ink gnocchi

with a nutmeg and gorgonzola cream sauce

"Heaven and Hell"

devil's food chocolate cake affogato

For dessert, I did a play on a heaven and hell theme, especially since I had this new devil's food cake recipe I'd been wanting to try out for some time now.  For the actual dinner, I served both devil's and angel food cake with plain ice cream, but the day after, I had some more devil's food cake left over, and it turned out to go beautifully in a devil's food, espresso, and vanilla ice cream affogato--so much so that I wish I'd served it this way instead as dessert on Halloween!

The cake, from the new book Baked Explorations (one of their pastry chefs was on Top Chef: Just Desserts!), is nice and dark and chocolate-y, yet still surprisingly light and fluffy and airy--and moist, too.  I don't know how well it pairs with the frosting suggested in the book, but it goes so well with vanilla ice cream--its crumbs sort of melting into chocolate goodness in the cream--that I'm not sure I'd ever serve it any other way!  Hot espresso poured over it all makes it definitely a heaven-worthy dessert.  (okay, I couldn't resist! :P)

Anyways, I hope you all had wonderful and fun Halloweens!  Happy November, everyone!


[Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of Baked Explorations to review but was under no obligations to post about it.  As always, I will never tell you about something that I don't love myself.]


Read on for recipes...

A Candyland (Cupcake) Adventure (+vanilla cupcake recipe)

Welcome to Candyland!

Nostalgia central!  Oh man, I have such found memories of that game--how Lord Licorice was so scary and thinking how weird it was that "plums" were considered candies.  Or how I loved Queen Frostine and the Ice Cream Sea.  I mean, who wouldn't like to go to an Ice Cream Sea?!?

(bokeh = sprinkles of the photographic world.)

A few weeks ago, when I made my holiday cupcakes, I took some to my hairdresser, to whom I'm always grateful for for fixing my bangs (after I, out of impatience, give them a hideous trim).  Upon delivering the box of cupcakes, the entire salon stopped dead in their tracks as everyone oohed-and-aahed in jealousy.  And I was asked on the spot to do these Candyland-themed cupcakes for a one year old's birthday party.  Oh, and before I forget, here's wishing Aedyn another year as great as her first!:

Okay, so I've said over and over again that cupcakes just aren't my thing.  I mean, first of all, there's that whole spiel that I'm sure you all don't want to hear again about how cupcakes are not equal to "mini-cakes."  But then there's the whole decorating thing.  I'm the same way with sugar cookies (which is why you'll almost never catch me making sugar cookies).  All those different frosting colors equals all those bowls and spoons to wash.  I just can't do it.  But the minute I heard "Candyland-themed," I was DOWN.  There are just some opportunities that are way too cool to pass up.  Oh, that, and I'm a huge sucker for nostalgia.

I ended up making two flavors of cupcakes: chocolate and vanilla.  You'll find my chocolate cupcake recipe in the Christmas cupcake post here.  As for vanilla yellow cupcakes, I've actually spent quite some time trying to find the perfect yellow cake recipe.  More recently, I've tried the yellow cake recipe from The Cake Bible, and though it was good, the cake would shrink a bit after baking and pull away from the cupcake paper.  So that one was out.  Finally, I turned to Magnolia Bakery, whose red velvet cake recipe I absolutely adore.  And bingo!  These vanilla cupcakes were so moist and airy with a buttery texture and laced with just a hint of lemon (okay, the lemon was my addition).  And, another huge plus for these cupcakes because they used whole eggs rather than just egg yolks--and really, egg whites are useful, but I'd really prefer not to have to store so many of them.

To go on top, I made two types of buttercream: a heavier classic buttercream, made with egg yolks, and an Italian meringue buttercream, with egg whites.  Buttercreams, and especially egg white-based ones, continually amaze me.  Whenever I make Italian meringue buttercream, I always have to repeat the mantra (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for you geeks): "Don't panic."  Because the trick to an Italian meringue buttercream is that, even if the mixture looks curdled after you add the butter, you should not panic.  Just keep whipping, and the whole thing miraculously becomes an ever-so-light and creamy frosting!  Yes.  Amazing.

For decorations, I made four different cupcakes, plus an extra large one for the special birthday girl, inspired by different characters and areas of the Candyland game.  From left to right above, we have candy cane, lollipop, gingerbread, and gumdrops.  The lollipop flowers were so much fun.  Basically, I took these great organic fruit lollipops from Trader Joe's and piped yellow chocolate letters on the surfaces.  For leaves, I cut leaf shapes out of different colors of taffy and attached them to the lollipop stems.  My downright favorites, though, were the gingerbread men.  I actually didn't have cookie cutters, so I hand-cut all of the men out (each one's an individual!).  Then, I piped three dots of buttons, and in a stroke of genius (if I may say so myself), added a small sprinkle heart.  Because, come on, that just makes it way more cute.

I had such an awesomely fun time making this order of cupcakes.  Sometimes it's nice that I'm "self-employed" on a job-to-job basis so that I can just take the orders that I want to do.  Anyways, enjoy the yellow cupcake recipe below!  I'm off to a conference in the cold part of our country (*ahem*, east) for my "day job," so I will see everyone next week!

Oh wait--one more thing.  I wanted to share something I learned about cupcakes after making them a couple of times over the past few weeks:

The key to cupcakes is sprinkles.  Lots of them.  (I'm not kidding.)

And Collette Peters is right: luster dust does wonders.  :-)

Read on for recipe...