Well, it’s been a bit, but what better time to get back into making retro desserts than spooky time– yeah actually this is a pretty limiting theme to work with.
Okay, But Why Though?
Honestly, most Halloween-themed desserts rely heavily on aesthetics. Sugar cookies cut into spooky shapes. Chocolate sandwich cookie pudding parfait type deals decorated with gummy worms. Firm-set gelatin molded into spooky shapes.
You get the idea
I’m not knocking these – I love a good sugar cookie. (Not the decorative icings that people put on them though. Less is more with that kind of stuff.) But it doesn’t really have much to do with the recipe itself.
The undisputed champ of Halloween desserts, as I mentioned in blogs past, is the gelatin brain. I did do some extensive testing of ‘red’ flavored gelatin dessert mixes to find the best brain color (which also involved keeping a picture of an actual freshly harvested human brain pinned to the top of my cell phone gallery). But even if you can’t Pantone match the real deal, the true spectacle of the dessert is provided by a highly specific mold you are unlikely to use for any other purpose. (Goth kids of the world, feel free to prove me wrong on this point.)
When racking my own non-gelatinous brain for a spooky dessert, I remembered a Jell-o cookbook I picked up a while back that was not-so-secretly Canadian.
Hmm, methinks this may have been developed North of the Border
Besides the little regional quirk, this collection of recipes had an extensive section of holiday-themed recipes, Halloween included. Surely I could find something of interest?
The Answer Was No
It’s not that there weren’t any interesting recipes, but rather their reliance on a Halloween Jell-o staple: Grape. Besides being an appropriate hue as-is, Grape Jell-o has the strange distinction of taking on a distinctly…creepy color when combined with anything white and creamy, like ice cream or yogurt.
You see what I mean
But there’s one other fun fact about Grape Jell-o: it tastes horrible. Sometimes, when I encounter inexplicably icky artificial flavors like this, I have to check with people whose taste buds were not permanently damaged in childhood by chronic ear infections to see if it’s just me. And honestly, I’m not a fan of the American ‘purple grape’ flavor in general, vastly preferring the Japanese ‘muscat’ for candy choices. But I’ve asked around, and there does seem to be some agreement that Grape Jell-o is, at most, a mid flavor.
Anyways, despite all this, I did still find one interesting creation; a ‘Witches’ Brew’ to be served up in a punch bowl.
Right away though, I ran into the same problems our favorite cranial confection suffers from. I think I have a see-through punch bowl somewhere, but it’s a really fancy faceted crystal type that wouldn’t work well with what’s here. Honestly, I would say you’re best off using like, a Pyrex glass mixing bowl for this deal. Their instructions for cutting out hands from firm-set Jell-o were…okay on first glance, but I immediately asked Google about small (but not too small!) hand-shaped cookie cutters to just use instead. I even had one in my cart before I looked more closely at the eyeball instructions and realized I needed to abandon ship. Yet another dessert that relies heavily on a specific mold you prolly won’t ever use again for the admittedly really cool effect.
What Now?
Well. If we’re not going for aesthetics, then the focus should be on flavors, right? And the obvious ingredient would be pumpkin.
This is just Orange Jell-o, though
But as I browsed through some pumpkin desserts that weren’t pie, I came to the conclusion that they really give Thanksgiving much more than scream Halloween. Back to the drawing board.
As I continued to scan my cookbook collection for inspiration, I came across the Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cook Book For Beginning Cooks of All Ages.
But really I’m gonna say like, 8~18
I have a few cookbooks that include a section of easy recipes meant for children to make themselves, usually limited to just combining a few ingredients to make a fun little drink or dessert. This, however, is a slightly more Home Economics style textbook, that assumes Mother is around to advise and supervise.
Not kidding about the Mother thing
Funnily enough, the assertion made here that your mom will be happy to have a Junior Cook in the kitchen is fairly tenuous. My own mother struggles to recreate her childhood cuisine precisely because her mother was strictly a solo act. I doubt this is a particularly rare circumstance either – depending on the kid you’re dealing with, I wouldn’t want them underfoot while I’m trying to get supper on either. Anyways.
Third time was the charm, as I realized the big component of Halloween is…(fanfare) Facilitating Fun for the Children. Sure, there’s plenty of activities for adults out there, but if you live in a neighborhood where trick-or-treating is still a thing, you’ll prolly make sure you have some candy to give out at bare minimum.
Many of the recipes here are incredibly simple, as to be expected. There’s also plenty of pictures, with some quality illustration and typefacing work.
Literally just carrots
There are a few more complicated meat dishes for main courses, but when I got to desserts, I saw my prize.
Apples!
I had kind of forgotten about apples, honestly. Mainly because I don’t enjoy their common kid-friendly(?) seasonal forms of ‘caramel’ and ‘candied’. There’s even a recipe in this book further on for said caramel apples, but yeah. No. Baked apples are simple and delicious, although coring an apple is a bit rough for me, let alone a child. When I placed my baking apple grocery order, my personal shopper was delighted to inform me how much she enjoyed her mother’s baked apple recipe (which apparently sometimes involved dough), and how they really did use to bob for apples at parties, and so on and so forth.
Not Recommended for Children
Once again, I’m not bothering to type out the recipe here: there’s nothing to it, really. The only change I made was the addition of chopped nuts to the filling. There were no specific apples specified, so I checked some reliable sources on what the agreed-upon ‘baking apple’ varieties were nowadays. Ultimately, I decided to go with a mix of Fuji and Granny Smith, partly due to easy availability in my area, and also for the color contrast.
Except that was a mistake
Turns out even if you use roughly the same size apple, different varieties have wildly different cook times. I’m sure pie makers everywhere are shaking their heads at me, thinking “rookie mistake, kid.” As you can see here, the Granny Smiths were more or less liquefacted. Meanwhile, the Fujis could have honestly used another 10~15 minutes. This really caught me by surprise, because as I’ve mentioned before, my oven reliably runs cold. For recipes that have you bake something for an hour, it’s not unusual for me to have to add a whole extra 30 minutes to the bake time. Even if I factor in my use of a metal baking pan instead of the ceramic bakeware pictured in the cookbook possibly affecting the bake time, I still likely would have had to take the Grannies out long before the Fujis were fork-tender.
Chopped walnuts unwittingly added a creepy vibe (plus the exciting experience of having to constantly remind yourself that no, that’s not a missed seed, but a nut shard)
There’s other reasons why I think this is actually not a great recipe for children. Coring apples actually isn’t too bad with the right tool. But coring them in a way that leaves the bottom intact is rough. I eventually figured out a consistent system to remove a partially cut core, but it was dangerous-looking enough that my father offered to spare his adult daughter from possible injury and take my place.
“Well, that’s what Mother is for, right?” a reader who’s been keeping track thinks to themselves. I mean, I guess. But if I was Mother, I’d just suggest a baked apple recipe where I could cleanly, quickly, and easily remove the cores. After I messed one up, I also realized the possibility of fully coring them, and then cutting a ‘plug’ of sorts for the bottom, but my one test case was amongst the liquefacted, so I wasn’t able to gauge the viability of that strategy.
Anyways. I have a few other notes, but they all boil down to more or less just making a different form of baked apples than this one. Sorry, kiddos! (Caramel apples would have been worse still, though.)
kelp 