J. | 
11 4th, 2009| 
The attempts at chocolate-molded skulls that you see above never made it to the public eye. And yet, here I am blogging about them! I do this because not everything that comes out of my kitchen is fit for public consumption, but in the past, I never even thought about showing them because I’m a crazy perfectionist. To a fault! And maybe it’s my age, you know, or the countless hours in the kitchen making stuff, but I’ve learned to be gentler with myself and be OK with my fumblings in flour. I’ve come to realize that the attempt at a project is sometimes more rewarding than the final outcome itself.
These awesome Day Of The Dead molds jumped out at me over at Bake It Pretty about a month ago. That site has claimed HOURS of my time online because of all their whimsical, cute baking supplies, from cool cupcake liners to retro-inspired packaging. When I saw this, I HAD to have it. Otherwise it would give me nightmares. Yes, I’m kind of obsessive about baking stuff like that.
When I saw that the site had these Clasen colored wafers as well, I put those in my cart, too. See, you can get a lot of melting chocolate elsewhere that’s brown, but never black. And their red ones were really vibrant, blood/Halloween red. I couldn’t wait for them to come in the mail!
I had the best-laid plans you know, I really did. I wanted to painstakingly paint the features on the molds, coloring different parts with different colors. Which I started to do, very early in the day. The plan was that I would make 24 of these things, and set them on top of some Pumpkin Cupcakes with Chocolote Cream Cheese Frosting. The cupcakes were going to be…LEGENDARY! (I’m channeling Barney Stinson for all you How I Met Your Mother fans.)
But then I realized, if I wanted these to turn out EXACTLY the way I wanted them, I would have to spend an average of 40 minutes (with cooling time in the fridge for the chocolate color to set up) on each piece. I mean, isn’t this gorgeous? It IS, but I think would have been 57 years old by the time I was done with all of them.
And this is where I think my kitchen attitudes have changed. In the past, I WOULD spend 57 years getting everything JUST EXACTLY RIGHT. No kidding. You see these cupcakes? They’re Dark Chocolate with Ganache and were for a friend’s birthday last year; I started making them at 8 pm and they took till 3 am, and I didn’t flinch. I was a zombie the next day, sure, but I didn’t back down.
But these days, I will make the best of what’s in front of me. I’m learning to DEAL. If it doesn’t work, I try not to cry into my dough and just move on. SUCH a big step for me. 
So, I decided to chuck the whole chocolate-skull thing and make the just the cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. And sprinkles. 
And you know what? They were good. REALLY good. Light and fluffy, yet moist and full of that spice flavor so associated with fall. I got the recipe from HERE, and it’s different from all the other pumpkin cupcakes I’ve made in the past (maybe because it calls for cake flour instead of all-purpose?). Not dense, but airy and yummy and perfect with the creamy-sweet frosting.
So, that was my big Halloween boo-boo (oh, I think that was a pun, wasn’t it?).
I made those little things, stored them in the fridge for the next day’s trip to work and called it a day. I may not have had the chance to make exactly what I wanted, but at least I still came away with something. And from what the officemates told me, chocolate skulls or not, they were STILL legendary.
And you know, there’s always NEXT Halloween!
