Cupcakes and pumpkins

Jeanne and Russ invited us to dinner and pumpkin carving at their house tonight, so we volunteered to take dessert, and spent last night baking and assembling desserts.


I've been reading all these fabulous blogs, mostly for weddings, but lots for baking and flower ideas.  One of my favorites is Bakerella.  Such great ideas on that blog!  So in combining ideas from Martha Stewart, the Barefoot Contessa and Bakerella, I decided to make chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache frosting with spiderweb designs (it is a pumpkin carving dinner party!), and semi-homemade ice cream cookie sandwiches.  


For the ice cream cookie sandwiches, we baked chocolate chip and white chocolate macadamia nuts cookies, and used mint chip and mocha almond fudge ice cream to make the sandwiches.  Malcolm spent many hours baking, sandwiching, and wrapping the ice cream sandwiches.  (Pictures to follow later).


While Malcolm was assembling ice cream sandwiches, I was baking cupcakes, making chocolate ganache, and piping white spiderweb designs with cream cheese frosting.

If you look on the top left, there is a spiderweb cupcake.  After piping spiderwebs on 12 cupcakes, I kind of got bored and made some other ones.  Like the Bob hearts Malcolm one.  But the kitty cupcake is all Malcolm.

I think I'm done baking for awhile.  But we'll see...there's always more ideas on Bakerella!!