I don’t know about you, but I am the kind of person that loves all of the creepy baking, DIY, and costuming fun of the Halloween season so much that I never want it to end and always spend a good part of November in a disappointed, uninspired funk. In fact, I couldn’t even get myself in the mood to bake or post any recipes for the entirety of November 2015. However, December is finally upon. Meaning it’s almost Christmas. Meaning it is once again seasonally appropriate to make The Nightmare Before Christmas-themed baked goods! These spooky little cake pops are filled with Christmas-y gingerbread cake festively spiked with spiced rum frosting and dressed up as Jack Skellington’s rendition of “Sandy Claus,” so if you too like a little Halloween in your Christmas, whip up a batch of these and get to “making Christmas” Halloween Town style★
Citrus Ginger Mulled White Wine
Quite belated, but happy new year! The holiday season may be over, but it’s still “cold season” both in terms of cold germs and cold temperatures so as far as I’m concerned, it’s still the right season for enjoying warm drinks. Specifically, mulled wine. This time I adapted my mulled red wine recipe to use a bottle of that Schwarz Katz riesling wine that comes in a cat-shaped bottle to make a mulled white wine. The result has enough citrus, ginger, and honey to likely cure the common cold, and enough white wine, rum, and spices to banish the winter blues, so definitely give it a try★[Continue Reading/続きを読む]
Drunken Snowman Eggnog Cake Pops
Christmas is finally this week so naturally it’s time for the last Christmas-y recipe of the year. Eggnog cupcakes would be the obvious seasonally-appropriate “cocktail cupcake” so I was originally all set to make a batch of those as my last Christmas baking endeavor of the year and even had the ingredients stockpiled away. However, last week one of my Japanese coworkers brought some cupcakes she made to work and while they didn’t taste like anything terribly special, the attention to detail she put into to decorating them adorably was impressive. I’m usually the sort to put taste above looks when I bake (mostly because I am too impatient to start eating!), but upon seeing those cute little cupcakes I realized I needed to start putting a little more effort into how my baked goods looked lest I lose to people like my coworker (yes, this is cupcake war). As such, I decided that instead of making normal eggnog cupcakes, I would challenge myself to make these snowman-shaped eggnog cake pops and then call them “drunken snowmen” due to the rum content in the eggnog recipe I use (if that doesn’t kill any germs in the raw egg then I don’t know what will!).
Pumpkin Spice Rum Cupcakes
Tokyo has been sliding into Christmas mode since Halloween ended, but I personally can’t bring myself to get into the winter-y Christmas spirit until December. That said, come next week it will be December and I know I will start wanting to leave my beloved pumpkins and kabocha squashes aside for Christmas cookies and mulled wine, so as a fitting last autumn-themed baked goods recipe I figured I would post these pumpkin spice rum cupcakes I made back in October. [Continue Reading/続きを読む]
Pikachu Pumpkin Rum Cakes
The Pokemon craze may be a source of late 90s-early 2000s nostalgia in America, but here in Japan it is still alive and well, and you can find a massive variety of Pokemon products from plush toys to dishes and tablewear all over the place. In fact, a couple of months ago I saw a silicon pan for making cute little Pikachu-shaped cakes in store and immediately snapped it up knowing that I would undoubtedly find myself baking for Pokemon fan one of these days. And sure enough, my Pokemon-obsessed friend’s birthday came up a couple of weeks ago so it was the perfect excuse not only to try out my Pikachu pan, but also to try out a pumpkin rum came recipe that I had been wanting to make.[Continue Reading/続きを読む]