Perfect Jack O’ Lanterns and a Tip About Orange
It’s almost Halloween, so I decided it’s about time to take one of the most common Halloween cookies of all, and jack him up a few notches. Get, it, jack him up?! HA HA HA, okay, you’re not laughing…
ANYWHO, I like the dimension and puffiness of a sectioned pumpkin, but I don’t how it looks to add a face on top of the base layer. It might be a bit on the OCD side, but I like realistic.
So here’s what I do. First, I use an food color marker to sketch out my jack o’ lantern’s face. If you want them to be uniform, use a stencil. After you have the face planned out, use flood icing to add a thin layer to fill in the sections you made.
Let that dry. Then use orange piping icing and a #2 tip to outline the facial features and divide the pumpkin into even sections.
Flood the face in by filling alternating sections, giving them about a half an hour to dry in between, then moving on to the remaining sections. This will give your pumpkin a LOT of dimension. If you like the “lift” I get from my icing, use thicker flood icing…somewhere between 12 and 20 seconds. The thicker it is, the higher it will go.
Let that dry, and add a stem and any other details you like, and you’re done!
While we’re on the subject of Halloween, I wanted to share another tip.
As much as I love making Halloween cookies I hate it that almost every traditional Halloween color has that poopy bitter taste {black, orange, and purple, some reds, ect.} So, I do what I can to make any color possible as tastless as possible.
This isn’t rocket science, but sometimes it’s the simple things that make the biggest difference. Remember when I shared my secret to no-taste red?
I used the same idea to create no-taste orange. I mix tulip red with a yellow color {going back to grade school color mixing},
And I end up with a nice, non-bitter orange color. Any yellow works, even electric version.
Play with it a little and you’ll end up with a completely custom orange color, and you’ll be doing a lot to take some of the icky taste out of your Halloween cookie collections!
If you haven’t had enough of me yet, you should hop on over to Confessions of a Cookbook Queen. I’m hijacking her blog for a day while she’s off eating good food and watching football in New Orleans.
Anyway, today is the beginning of a new week. I hope it turns out to be a great one for everyone!
Happy Halloween baking everyone!