Captain's Log: Day 3 (Food Blog)
(What Shen was supposed to look like)
Shiver me timbers. It is (more like it was) the time of the year to dress up as a pirate and find treasure and treats buried deep within the neighbourhood. So far I've dealt with breakfasts, lunches, and now it was time for the holy grail of culinary arts, DESERT! This food lab involved multiple things, and I'll cover all of them. Pumpkin seeds, pumpkin carving, and chocolate cake cones.
So when you carve a pumpkin the first step is to gut it. In the past years I would do that and chuck away the seeds. This year I learned that doing such a thing was as demonic as the devil himself. Turns out the seeds are actually useful and you can eat them. It also turns out that it can actually taste good. Just like potato chips, this Halloween alternative was crunchy and came in different flavours. I was tasked with the job of doing BBQ, a mix of spices. Other flavours were Cinnamon and Sugar, Parmesan Oregano, and other BBQ. Why do I list BBQ twice? Because my BBQ seeds were extra special, and deserve the title of extra BBQ. We embraced the spirit of BBQ-ing and fire so much that we burnt our seeds really badly. We shoved 3 pans into one oven and 2 of them (both ours) just burnt because they were taking in a lot of heat. The 3rd one turned out perfectly. Regardless, I got to feast on other's seeds and the Parmesan ones were simply amazing. I was not expecting such great taste and crunchiness. Now whats funny is when I tried to do it at home (I went with Cinnamon Sugar because it was easy), history repeated itself and most of my seeds burnt. But the ones that didn't were really good, and my family enjoyed them. Fun fact, during some research I did about Zinc, pumpkin seeds are actually a great source of Zinc which is important for your development!
Now onto the pumpkin carving. The most iconic part of Halloween. Last year and the year before I would take a kitchen knife and free-hand a random face. This year was way different. There were careful steps to picking a design, and outlining it, then carving it carefully. The design was a challenge, Shen the Eye of the Twilight. A ninja from a popular video game League of Legends. Nerdy eh? Well turns out Shen was much harder to carve than we thought and had a lot of small details (the face was impossible). Our hands would start shaking from all the little pin pricks we had to do on the pumpkin, and we constantly had to rotate pumpkin to avoid exhaustion, oh the drama! We tried our best but it didn't turn out quite right. The picture should've been bigger because our final carving had holes that were too small and would not let light in. My solution, MORE LIGHTS. I stuffed the pumpkin with 10 lights to get it to shine but still it was sad that it wasn't as amazing as it could've been but we still got a lot of votes in a pumpkin competition from video game fans (it was hard to compete with Cinderella, Psy, and Joker). I got to use some new tools to do the carving and applied this new technique to carve a ghost pumpkin at home with my little sister (sadly I broke my carving knife and cut myself near the end, so remember to not apply too much force).
The next part of this Halloween mania was Devil's (ha ha) chocolate cupcake ice-cream marshmallow cones?!? A confusing name for a confusing dish. It was a spoof of an ice cream cone, the ice cream on the inside was replaced by chocolate cake, and the top was marshmallow. It was a weird idea but looked nice. I got to work with chocolate and use a technique where you put it into a bowl that is over boiling water to get the temperature just right. It was a success and getting the chocolate cake part done was easy (although putting the mix into the cones was a bit messy). The marshmallow was prepared by others but I got to watch it mix inside a stand-mixer while snacking on wonderfully sugar-y cotton candy. Another fun fact, we were doing this in the dark, not so safe but we managed to stay alive.
The good part was coming up, piping. I've seen piping on TV shows on cakes and I knew I was going to screw up but I didn't care. I took a piping bag and started squirting out this hardening marshmallow onto the cones and it was a mess. I got maybe 10% done nicely and the rest were blobs. It was fun but it looks like I was not meant to be a decorator. So how did it taste? To be honest weird. The marshmallow was not as squishy as normal marshmallow and felt weird in your mouth and the chocolate was really good but really made you want to drink. I guess I would add flour to the recipe to make the chocolate cake more fluffy and maybe skip out on the marshmallow for some whipped cream. It did look cool though to be carrying around a never-melting ice cream cone.
All in all this Halloween themed food lab turned out nicely. I was really into it and it was fun, plus I learned new things like how to professionally carve pumpkins, roast seeds, and melt chocolate. Now every year I can roast seeds and carve a more beautiful pumpkin!
P.S. I was Mitt Romney for Halloween it was great.
"Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble."
Doesn't sound like a good recipe.
I disagree when you say that the designs were similar. I think many of them were very different and creative (Shen, Angry Birds, Psy, etc.) and that being allowed to pick your own design let people experiment, and made it more personal. It wouldn't be as fun if someone told you what to carve. I also think your pumpkin was great and let a lot of light through (unlike mine), and by the way I'm jealous of your piping skills. It's also nice to hear you are remembering the information you learned about nutrition and health, and I also want to try and make a hearty, healthy meal.
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