Halloween Treats

Happy Halloween!

Earlier this month, I decided that I just had to throw my own Halloween party. Partly because I'm not allowed to go to any of the big Halloween parties that happen around Dubai and mostly because I've been looking for an excuse to drape my house in decorations.

The über delicious graveyard cake

It was held last weekend, and all my girlfriends were invited. A good number of the girls showed up and were impressed with how much work my family and I put into the set up. My mom had bought around 50 yards combined of orange and black fabric, lots of Halloween ornaments, and one of her good friends who works at an event management company had lent us a tall witch carved out of Styrofoam and a bunch of Styrofoam pumpkins. It was lots of fun to watch everything come together. Lots of candles and lights set the mood and I was ready to party.

What's a Halloween party without the treats, though, right? My lovely friend Qadria arrived to my place early with a pre-baked and frosted dense chocolate cake (which was amaaaaaazingly delicious) that we later decorated to look like a graveyard. She also brought dense chocolate cupcakes frosted with chocolate ganache and topped with meringue ghosts. Super cool! I baked vanilla cupcakes the night before which we later stuffed with a wonderful toffee sauce, topped with a chocolate frosting and then sprinkled crushed caramel Oreos to give the illusion of dirt. Then we put gummy worms on them. Can you say 'heart attack'? We also made brain cupcakes (vanilla cupcakes with pink vanilla frosting) and cake balls that we decorated to look like eyeballs. Decorating with Qadria was so much fun and quite the success.

Braaaaaaainzzz

The girls showed up one by one and I was highly impressed with their costumes. Won't be able to share those photos but we had costumes like The Black Swan, main character Alex from A Clockwork Orange, a pilgrim who made her costume from napkins and a pillowcase (!!!), and a full blown lion from The Wizard of Oz. Overall, my house was infested with some genius women who had really cool costumes. I think my party was the best costume party of all ;)

'Vampire's Delight' punch

All photos are taken by the lovely Devina Divecha. Visit her food blog, she's very talented and one of my favorite bloggers!


Happy Baking!

"Y U NO" Guy Cake

I've been a little quiet but I'm going to blame it on the fact that everyone's birthday is coming up in the next 3 months and I'm getting so many cake orders. Lots of fun but just as exhausting! I've been itching to blog so I decided I'd put up something quick for now.

It was Sajid's birthday yesterday and a his good friend Nosheen had ordered a cake for him from abroad (yes, my first international order! I declare myself cool). She sent me this photo and asked if I could make this cake:

Y U NO guy

Those familiar with internet memes will know the Y U NO guy easily. If you're curious though, read up on some internet humor here.

I suggested that we should do something fun with the cake and instead of just a static sheet cake, we could make a giant Y U NO guy with his hands sticking out of the cake and add her message. She loved the idea and gave me the go ahead. Yay!

Now, Sajid's a real-life troll and probably spends a chunk of his free time here. But aside from that, he's a great guy and I was excited to make a big cake for him. So I called up my good friend Hana of Free The Line and asked her if she'd like to help me with detailing for the cake i.e. the very complicated face. And she agreed! She's a wonderful artist and I love working with her.

I prepared everything two days in advance; searched for pure white frosting recipes and suffered with coloring the frosting a nice pure black. But I finally managed. On the morning of October 5th, I picked up Hana and we went back to my place to work on the final touches. I must say that we were quite proud of our accomplishment. We gave ourselves a nice high 10 and decided it was ready to go.

I delivered the cake on the same night and celebrated with Sajid and his friends; it was awesome to see everyone admiring the cake. Such a great feeling!

Happy Birthday again, Sajid!