Halloween Baking 2024

We’re delayed a little bit due to the arrival of some resin ghosts, but that’s fine. It’s a minor miracle that any normal articles get finished during the countdown. As always, this stuff was from last season, and I stew on the unprocessed photos for a year in order to properly age them. As a bonus, some of them were from TWO years ago, so you get a little extra-extra.

And yes, all three are from Target’s generic brand, and if you see any out and about now, they might be well past their expiration date, sure to give you wheat flu or something. Admire them from afar, or as you will see here, admire them not.

Finally, before we begin, there’s a small gallery of food-stuffs that was in the folder of images, and I wasn’t quite sure why they were there. Rather than waste them, I’ll chew up 1.21Mb of internet electrons and a few extra milliseconds of latency. Enjoy below.

Mummy Brownies

Now two years later, I’m looking at the product photo and realizing that the mummy icing was applied THEN cut, vs cut then iced. Spoiler alert, things aren’t going to go well from here on out, so brace yourself.

The Mummy Brownie Kit is essentially a stock brownie mix. Being a generic store brand, I assume it also adds some extra things like maltodextrin and soy powder that will either give you cancer or a few extra unsheddable pounds. An icing mix and sugary candy eyes rounds out the kit.

Part of the fun with these kits is bringing out the Cuisinart and letting it get carpal tunnel on my behalf. My frustration in the past was having to use a spoon to beat the batter until my arms fell off and people called me nubby. While personal effort is alleviated, it also generally just does a better job so there’s no unmixed lumps that sneak by my 15 seconds of stirring before I give up.

Even better is that the Cuisinart has multiple attachments, so I don’t even have to clean the first before mixing up the second. It does leave a sink full of dirty utensils, but we leave that work for those who can’t stand the sight of unkempt kitchens. It’s a win/win.

If you’re wondering why the icing has a sickly light orange tint to it, instead of regular milk, I used the Vanilla BooStruck brand to give it a change of look and a slightly worse taste. It is mainly for creating the stripes, but doubles as a glue for the sugar eyes.

Per the opening paragraph, I see now how I should have drizzled the icing. By applying it per bar instead of over the whole pan, there’s no opportunity for proper criss-crossing effects, rendering each into some sort of spring-loaded snake from a joke shop. There also weren’t enough eyes to go around, so I broke one in half to give a devious shifty-eyed look to one, but it just ended up looking stoned. I took a picture, but I can’t find it, so you’ll just have to take my word.

So all in all, they didn’t come out horrible, and they tasted fine. I think they all got eaten, which is as good a sign as any.

Zany Zombie Sugar Cookies

Zany Zombie Sugar Cookies is another attempt at naming alliteration but gives up halfway through. I’m pretty sure there’s a language that has ‘sugar’ starting with a ‘Z’, so maybe that could have gotten it a bit further. 75% is still passing in most schools, but others set the bar at 35, so I guess we’re sticking to public education standards on this.

Again, the box photo promises the world. All manners of kooky faces stare back at you, taunting your artistic ability or lack thereof. And realistically, even Picasso himself couldn’t molest the tubes to match what is achieved by the minutes of Photoshop used for the final result.

The droopy tongue appears to be a common theme. I’m guessing this was either due to Zombies being super silly or the need to use up one of the three colors provided. I’m leaning towards the former since black is drastically underused, despite making up 33.333333333333% of the choices. And after the issues with the Mummy Brownie eyes, I’m wondering they’re going to cheat me out of these as well. There’s an awful lot of cyclopsism and winking going on, which leads me to believe that they need to play it safe and make it last.

I think the top part is supposed to be brains, because of course all zombies walk around with their entire skull caps missing. But I get the feeling that it’s a bad perm, fit only for a 70s drama or a 90s boy band. We’ll see how well the icing tubes dispense the frosting, so perhaps it’s just not possible to do anything different.

Mixing the ingredients is mercifully simple. I believe it’s just butter and the powder. You’re supposed to use softened butter, but I never remember to leave it out for hours beforehand, so I just stick it in the microwave for 5 seconds, which reduces it to a liquid. That never makes the batter form properly. Ever.

Some of the powder ended up on the table, but I found that a little nasal vacuuming gives me enough energy to finish the project. Who knew?!

The next part has you dividing the dough into 15 equal parts, and would you know it? It came out perfectly to that amount. Perhaps I had to borrow from Peter to pay Judas, but the end result gave me some perfectly even cookies. It even retained the colors, like prior years, which both thrills and worries me.

Now it’s up to you to decorate using the combo of Black, Pink, and Red icing in conjunction with the candy eyes. Once again, you see that there were not enough eyes to go around, so some liberal use of mutilation or just angry looks was needed. I have to say, they didn’t turn out half back. Half bad is still leagues from where I should be, but it keeps in the spirit of this ongoing series.

So there we have it. Did they come out okay? I think so. Did they all get eaten? No. Why are there rats soaking in a bowl? Never you mind. Stop asking questions!

Trick-or-Treat Cookie Sandwich

Oh boy. Now we’re getting down to the cursed items. First I must address the name, which implies that these will be handed out to children on Halloween proper. Even if they came out as intended—they won’t—surely this would be a terrible choice. And what’s this malarkey of ‘color changing filling mix’? As we’ll see later, it does change color, but the great majority of powders do when water is added. I’m confused, but that may be part of the Halloween spook.

There’s the usual ingredients of some sort of cookie/brownie base, a filling, and some fixin’s. The base is a deep black, reminiscent of infant meconium both in color and texture. Harkening back to the minstrel shows of yore, those candy eyes are back again combining with the rosy filling and jimmies to complete the act.

I had some other confections from prior baking sessions, but I guess I never got around to using them. This will be a bit of foreshadowing, since things aren’t going to go as planned.

Okay, I guess the filling does live up to its color changing claim. I’m not sure if this still would qualify as a feature. I mean, it’s cool when it happens, but I envision the final result would be where the selling points should focus, not some surprise during the mixing process. Perhaps they were one bullet point shy as the deadline approached.

The cookie parts seemed to go okay. In all honesty, they look like the end result of my usual attempts at making cookies, so I can’t be 100% if they’re edible or charcoal hockey pucks. At this point, I put them in the freezer since I figured the filling would melt and turn into goo.

And guess what! It happened anyway. Perhaps I added too much milk to the filling, or didn’t chill that enough either. Regardless, it spilled out and oozed all over the plate. Adding the candy eyes and confetti only made a mockery of the process. It was pointless eating them, since whatever surface tension was keeping the last remnants in place quickly vacated once any inward pressure was placed. Didn’t help that there was no flavor, the filling being some sort of Cool-Whip-ish vibe rather than the traditional whoopee-pie’s pig fat and sugar. More things modernity has stolen from us.

I’ll try to get one more article in before the month is up, but keep checking on the count down since I put the most effort into that (relatively speaking).