Hallowe’en is such a brilliant occasion. Lots of people hate it because it’s hackneyed and teaches kids to harass adults when they don’t get given sweets for free after having already harassed them. What I love about Hallowe’en is that there’s no subtext; there’s no spritual or moral message, no serious thing behind it, no history to repeat monotonously at school (I’m looking at you Guy Fawkes)…you can just dress stupidly, drink/eat a lot of fun things and at no point have to have the discussion about capitalism taking over what used to be a meaningful holiday. After all, capitalism invented Hallowe’en!
What I also love is that it gives me a chance to bake ridiculous things, and since I have a party tonight and wanted to bring something a bit more exciting than a two-euro bottle of ‘wine’ I made vampire cookies (recipe here)and dung balls:
They took no time at all to make, and everything went according to plan.
Sorry, just needed a moment to recover from the massive head rush caused by my ten-minute bout of raucous laughter.
I burnt myself quite severely in multiple places. The ganache separated into a huge brown solid mass floating in transparent brown oil in a way that could not have looked more disgusting. The cookie dough was so soft it stuck to me and the table and I eventually had to freeze it. One of the cakes fell down the back of the the oven during baking and burnt itself onto the oven floor in large gloopy crags. The rescued ganache went everywhere and on everything. I dropped cake batter on my feet. I practised my German swearing vocab so well that my flatmate told me I was starting to sound like a real German.
Nonetheless, this four hours of lurching from crisis to disaster to apocalypse at least produced something which looks like it might not cause fatal food poisoning, but the night is young…
Tune in tomorrow for a more worthwhile post; I’m off to start scraping down the kitchen walls.
