Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloweeeeeeeeeeeeen!!!

Elliot & Kitty Mommy!

Excited listening to the trick-or-treaters in the hall!

It's Halloween and all four of us are in scary mode! We're enjoying having trick-or-treaters in our new building! As you can see above, Elliot and Elphie anxiously await our candy-seeking visitors. Elliot's been a hit since he's the only one of them who will let us pick him up and show him off at the door. Elphie gets excited until the door opens, and then she's history. A little one-year-old was waving at him and practically walked into our apartment! :) IT is on, so it's officially Halloween!!

This leads me to my latest baking adventure which I discovered on Pinterest through a gf of mine. I bring you: Spiced apple cupcakes with salted caramel frosting, all from scratch. SO SO happy I made these even if I'm not the biggest fruity dessert fan. The frosting takes the cake (pun intended) in this recipe. The bits of apple had me worried. If I see anything chunky in dessert, it's usually nuts or fruit, which I'm not a fan of. However, in the case of these cupcakes, the chunkiness actually works by providing mini-bites of fall flavor. 

Basically this recipe calls for brown sugar, regular sugar, butter, vanilla, eggs, baking powder and soda, milk, salt, nutmeg, cinnamon, and heavy cream. Horribly terrible for you, but what a way to go.

You make the batter, fold in the apples, and then...THEN...comes the fantabulistic homemade caramel frosting. If you've never smelled homemade caramel cooking away on your stove, the best of life simply has yet to arrive in your kitchen. This was not only delicious frosting, but ridiculously easy compared to the first caramel I made months and months ago. All this entailed was melting 1/2 cup of butter (1 stick) on the stove in a saucepan, adding a cup of brown sugar and 1/3 cup heavy cream and stirring constantly until the sugar dissolves. Then you throw in 1/4 tsp on salt (sea salt was my preference) and let it bubble for a minute. Then you take it off the stove and let it cool a bit. To transform it into frosting, you add 1.5-2.5 cups of powdered/confectioners sugar a little bit at a time until you reach the consistency of frosting you want. All I need in life at this point is this caramel drizzled over my caramel macchiato, and I'll die a happy gal.

The caramel pre-frosting



...aaaaaand ready to be piped!

The recipe was for regular sized cupcakes, but I thought mini-ones would be a lot of fun. I was right! Between the cute little size of the cupcakes and the piping of the icing with some sea salt on top, these were a definite Autumnal hit! I brought them to school today and my classmates really dug them! I made another batch for Hubby to bring to work tomorrow for post-Halloween yummies, so we shall see if they are dug by all. I'm really proud of how these turned out. A real match of aesthetically pleasing and gosh darn yumminess!