Front Burner: Trick out your Halloween treats!
Frankenstein heads. Photo by Rebecca Barnett l The Roanoke Times.
I’m a fan of Pinterest.
For someone who likes cooking, gardening, crafts, fashion, art, traveling and more, it’s easy to find gorgeous pictures and Internet articles I can “pin” to my “boards.” Better yet, because I save too many magazine clippings, recipes and cookbooks, Pinterest offers me the liberating ability to hoard online to my heart’s content.
But the content on Pinterest is sometimes annoyingly perfect. The wedding dresses, gowns and jewelry can be beyond the average person’s means; gardens and craft projects that look so easy are often anything but.
This is particularly true in the realm of recipes, which are typically accompanied on Pinterest by professionally styled images. At home, the finished product might be delicious but the appearance probably won’t be up to Pinterest standards.
For Halloween, I decided to test some of the cutest recipes I discovered through Pinterest to determine if they were more like tricks than treats. With the help of two coworkers, we tested six recipes – a pumpkin-shaped cake made by stacking two Bundt cakes, Frankenstein heads made from crispy rice treats, white chocolate ghosts, witch hat cookies, witch brooms and white chocolate “bones.”
Some of the results made us cackle like a witch over her cauldron, but others made us scream like a vampire in the sun.
To read more, click here.
Click the links to see these recipes:
Pumpkin Spice Cake
Monster Toes
Spider Web Pumpkin Cheesecake
(The rest of the recipes from the column, including the Frankenstein heads, are in the body of the column, so just click the link to read more, above)
Does your family have a favorite recipe you always prepare around Halloween?
October 24, 2012 - 9:49 AM
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Oh! good to know! I’m a HUGE pinterest fan/addict and was going to make the witches broomsticks. I hadn’t seen the witches hats. I might have to make some of those too…
Had to giggle. I made the ghosts 15 or so years ago (except they were called Yummy Mummies I think) from an article in the Roanoke Times. I remember making the witches hats too!
Yeah, those seemed to be the two most popular recipes of the ones we tested. Did you have good luck with the ghosts, Amy?
Lindsay I made them with two young girls so the process was fun and for me that’s what this kind of stuff is about. We had a good time and they tasted good!
Those Frankenstein heads were DELICIOUS (That sounds funny). But rice crispy treats covered with chocolate? Hellooooo? How could that be bad?
The cake also turned out to be a keeper recipe. I used my favorite cream cheese frosting recipe to ice it (doubled for that pumpkin-shaped cake): http://www.roanoke.com/food/recipes/details/?rid=1048&sorig=qs