Obviously I had to have appropriately-themed baked goods at the Halloween party! I also challenged myself to make them gluten- and dairy-free. I’d say they were a success!

Flying Saucers

I googled around and found a basic GF sugar cookie recipe. I don’t think it matters which one you use, but as I learned, it DOES matter which FLOUR you use. It’s not something I’ve ever had to think about before. GF flours can be made of different stuff – usually they are some kind of rice or tapioca flour, but there are also brands that are based on chickpeas. Take it from me: if you try to make a sugar cookie with chickpea flour, it will taste like weird sweet bitter bean butt. I’m sure the flour would be good for other baked goods, but for a sugar cookie -where there is relatively little to mask the flour – you gotta go with rice.

They were pretty easy to make: use a biscuit cutter to cut out the body and a smaller biscuit cutter to cut the top. Originally I was going to just put the flat circles on top of each other (as I saw in some other recipes) but decided to use a little piece of dough to make it into an actual dome.

I sort of used Christine McConnell’s book as a guide, mostly in the sense that I was inspired by her photos, ignored the recipe, and then realized I had sort of re-invented her wheel. Although as I recall, she stacked the dough to make the dome whereas I put mine underneath and mushed it down. AT ANY RATE

I tried to take Christine’s advice about combining edible dust with vodka but (as you can see on the right) I found that it was too thin. The silver-er saucer was done with those Wilton edible color mists. I’m sure I just got my proportions wrong with the dust, but the mist was so easy and fast that I used it for the whole batch.

Et voila! I’m sure Christine would have crafted some beautiful black edible ink, but I opted for one of those little glitter gel tubes – it did the trick! I thought the cookies were pretty good but I did notice several half-eaten saucers sitting around after the party, so maybe they were just “good for gluten-free.” I ate all the rest so I ain’t mad.

Alien Eggs

I guess I didn’t take any process photos of these, probably because they were a total eff up! The eggs were just cake pops (GF box mix because I’m not a superhero, colored green with food coloring).  I WAS going to make a shell for the egg based on Nerdy Nummies’ video (below), but with modeling chocolate instead of fondant because fondant is gross. Unfortunately, I did something really wrong with Christine’s modeling chocolate recipe (because of course I have to make it myself) and it was all crumbly and weird. It still tasted fine, so I just made a nest for the eggs and called it a day. PROBLEM SOLVING