Belated Halloween Recap Post. Includes Squirrels and Wallpaper and Voting.

Good LORD I've missed this.

HI EVERYONE.

I started going through my photos from Halloween and deleting the ones that were blurry and/or crime-scene like and oohing over the ones that showed the chocolate ganache in all its decadent glory, and I realised just how much fun I was having, and how long it had been since I'd done it, and how I really kind of wanted to write a post. So.

I decided that I needed to do a Halloween recap post. If for nobody else but me.

BEETLE HALLOWEEN RECAP POST
ps I'm sorry this is so late. 

In the interest relaying the most pertinent events with the minimum (for me . . . ) of babble, and because my memory tends to sort itself into bullet points (and sub-bullet points) after a few days, here are the major happenings of Halloween 2014.

• Madame Vastra and I drove down from Vermont on Friday morning.
• This of course included the requisite 4am gym, so I stairmastered with the BBC, showered, drove 40 more miles on I-93 South, and stopped for coffee when it hit 7am and places that were NOT Dunkin Donuts were open. At 7.01 and 23 seconds I cracked the door of a coffee shop in Lincoln, NH that had literally just been unlocked by it's groggy owner said, perhaps a tad too cheerfully, "GOOD MORNING MAY I PLEASE HAVE TWO LARGE CUPS OF COFFEE WITH SOYMILK AND A GLASS OF WATER?"
• In case you missed the major bullet point of above. I drove. From Vermont. For me, in my relative driving novice-ness, this is kind of an achievement. I didn't get lost! I didn't crash! I only stopped to pee once! 
• I noticed that when I am doing interstate changes or other similarly high-attention-demanding manoeuvres, I talk to myself in a very clipped British accent. I don't know when this started. Or when it will go away. 
• We went and watched the trick or treaters on Main Street and had a total fluffy-warm-and-fuzzy-on-the-inside-Disney-Family-Movie moment watching all the adorable kids in their adorable costumes worn underneath their adorable parkas. 
• New England childhood rite of passage #9849849: trick-or-treating with an ugly old coat thrown over your painstakingly created costume because it's 27 F outside and snow is forecast for tomorrow. 
• Ashby, btw, is THE TRICK-OR-TREATING CAPITAL OF MIDDLESEX COUNTY. We had flood lights, state police, troopers with those runway landing glow stick thingys . . . THE WORKS. It was totally awesome.
• We got one trick-or-treater.
• This trick-or-treater was a squirrel.
• Who showed admirable self control in eating precisely ONE mini Snickers before apparently deciding he wanted to watch his waistline and leaving the rest. 
• I found this out when I went before bed to collect the bucket full of approximately $50 of candy that I'd left on the front porch, with all the lights on, with all the curtains open, hoping it would prove a beacon to still hungry children. The bucket had been knocked over, and one mini Snickers had been divested of its wrapper and consumed. We figured it was a squirrel because if it had been a raccoon not only would all the candy be gone, the raccoon would have probably knocked on the door, informed us that he was moving in, and did we have anything "savoury" as a palate cleanser? 
• I voted.
• Reason #65165 I love living in a tiny Massachusetts town:
• When you call the town clerk requesting your absentee ballot, "Lorraine" not only says "oh, you guys are in the big white house, yah I see your Mother all the time" but invites you over on Saturday for voting and tea. You fill out your absentee ballot in front of the woodstove in her kitchen, aided by her large blue-eyed husky Jack, who sticks his nose in your armpit as you check all the boxes for DEMOCRAT. 
• retrospective bullet point: Fat lot of good that did. 
• We discovered a suspicious leak in the corner of the dining room ceiling. 
• This means I got to see our handyman, a rare treat for a lightning weekend home. 
• I always hated that wallpaper anyway.
• I COOKED. DUH. 

HALLOWEEN WEEKEND FOOD

*not a comprehensive list as if I were to list all four loaves of bread and various other things I'd be here all day and this is already late enough. So herewith are the photogenic highlights. 

CARAMEL CORN WITH SALTED ALMONDS

This is such a fussy recipe for me to make, I know, but I was drooling over the Epicurious and Martha Stewart slideshows that get SO AMAZING at this time of year, and I just decided to take a risk and do it. Had I made caramel before? No. Did we own a popcorn popper? No. Does either of us eat popcorn? Um, no. 

BUT LIBRARIANS DO. ESPECIALLY LOVELY ONES.

Please note the added Witch Hat.

Epicurious calls this one, quite poshly, Caramel Corn with Smoked Almonds and Fleur de Sel. And honestly it's not that hard despite the intimidating name. I did shell out for Marcona Almonds (thank you amazon.com) because I didn't want to spend four hours smacking grocery-bought Diamond Roasted with a hammer. I also used microwave popcorn (I KNOW!!! RIGHT?!? CAN YOU STAND IT???), the oil and butter free kind, which I figured would give me the same results in the end and also make my life so much easier. I did three envelopes of the stuff and it seemed to work out proportion wise. 

The trick, which they tell you and which I initially TOTALLY SCOFFED AT, was that you do need to work faster than you have ever worked in your life. Caramel hardens in a nanosecond, and if you have not evenly spread it over your popcorn, then you're fresh out of luck and left holding a meteorite-shaped mass over a bowl of blissfully caramel-free golden kernels. But once you understand that, and hopefully this understanding will be reached BEFORE rather than AFTER, it's actually a pretty simple thing.

The one other thing I learned was that when you plunge your hand into a molten pot of boiled sugar by mistake, it really hurts. Really really really hurts. 

I held on to the saucepan though. 

Beetle = Hardcore

CHOCOLATE CAKE WITH BITTERSWEET GANACHE

or

HALLOWEEN BLACK CAT CAKE

which sounds so much nicer

Duh, Halloween means chocolate. 

I realise that the same can be said for Easter, and Christmas, and all right Valentine's Day too, but when I was deciding what to make for pudding it was obviously going to be deep, dark, squishy, and chocolatey. Kind of a given. 

I wanted just a simple, dark chocolate cake. One that had sour cream in it and would therefore remain moist and gooey, and one that used unsweetened, bittersweet, and at the very palest semi-sweet. NONE OF THIS MILK CHOCOLATE NAMBY PAMBYNESS, PEOPLE. I'd had a lot of luck with my Ganache truffles so I figured I'd do a ganache icing too, since it's really really easy and spreads so nicely, especially when your kitchen is the relative temperature of the outdoors. 

Once again Martha saves the day. This recipe from her Everyday Cookbook popped up in my search engine, and it had the ganache hyperlinked and everything. Done and DONE. The cake really was super easy, not fussy, and I didn't have to buy anything special. The chocolate is just unsweetened cocoa powder, which I think everyone has in their kitchen, even if you never cook at all and hate chocolate. It's just something that EXISTS in the back of your cupboard. It's a fixed point in time and space, is what I'm saying in Doctor Who terms. The ganache, too, is just heavy cream and a giant hunk of bittersweet. I mean . . . 

But with the ease of the cake, the cooling, the ganache, the spreading, what was I going to obsess over? 

Ohhhh.

Right. 

Someday I will remember the FIRST time that when you cut out a template, you have to cut the INSIDE out. Someday I will remember this BEFORE I waste ten sheets of paper and a lot of unnecessary scissoring.

Totally random yet cool ganache / powdered sugar intersection that makes the cat look FEROCIOUS.
Quite unlike my own kitties.
Who prefer to be ferocious in their dreams.
Or possibly at treat time.

It should be noted that we have not one but TWO black cats, and both were particularly pleased with this contribution to the menu. Though the standard silhouette for them during the weekend was more of the large shapeless blob variety, one ear visible over the rim of a basket, twitching towards the space heater.

Less this:

More this: 

OH AND ALSO I MADE PARSNIPS

Inconsequential, but they were so pretty that I had to share. I braised them, incidentally, for what seemed like EONS but they were pronounced delicious, so it was worth the wait. 

The bowl in the background, btw, is lentils and spinach and kelp YES KELP.

So, Halloween! All benefits of kelp, lentils, and parsnips completely overshadowed by black cat cake made entirely of chocolate and butter and heavy cream, but hey.

IT'S THE HOLIDAYS, YOU GUYS. IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

Get ready for Beetle Thanksgiving Extravaganza. I've been doing a LOT of stairmaster menu planning . . .