Halloween dessert ideas

Ingredients

Spider Web Lollipops:

• 1 1/2 cups isomalt
• 2 tablepsoon water
• silicon mat
• 10 candy sticks, or popsicle sticks
• royal icing, tinted black
• parchment triangles, for piping
• candy thermometer
• cold water bath (pot with cold water)

Vanilla Dirt Cakes:

• favorite vanilla cake batter (spread on a cookie sheet, and baked)
• 15 chocolate wafer cookies, crushed
• 500 g, cherry pie filling
• 500 g, vanilla buttercream
• cupcake toppers were made using stickers from Martha Stewart’s collection.

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Preparation

• Spider Web Lollipops:
  In a small saucepan, combine isomalt and water and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Keep a constant eye on the sugar, and heat until it reaches a 150′C (hard crack stage) on your candy thermometer. Once 150′C is reached, dip the sauce pan into your cold water bath (just for a second, you don’t want the sugar to cool entirely, you just want to prevent it from continuing to cook– you’ll hear sizzle noises and see some steam, so don’t be scared). Pour 1 1/2″ diameter ‘blobs’ onto your silicon mat, and insert a candy stick if making lolipops. Allow to cool. When the isomalt cools, it should be hard and see through and lifts relatively easy off your silicon mat. Using your royal icing, pipe patterns onto the isomalt circles. Spiderwebs are fairly simple, but if you don’t have enough patience, scribbling is just as fun.
• Vanilla Dirt Cakes:
  Once you bake your vanilla sheet cake, cut round circles from the cake. Using buttercream as adhesive, stack layers of cake on top of one another. If you want to fill your cakes with cherry pie filling, cut a smaller circle out of the middle layer (so it looks like the letter “O”), and scoop your filling into the center. Top the edges with buttercream, and seal with a top cake circle. Once you spread a rough coat of buttercream onto your mini-cakes, refrigerate for 20 minutes or until the buttercream hardens, just to make it easier (and less messy) when you roll them into the crushed cookies. You can always make vanilla dirt cupcakes by scooping out the centre of the cupcake, filling it with cherry filling, and topping it with buttercream .