Oh boy, this was a bit of a crazy baking week for me. More like a crazy baking Friday, I guess.

We had been invited to a small Halloween backyard party, complete with pizza and Halloween art. And I’ve been well trained by my mum, and knew that I couldn’t go empty-handed.

So, Meyer Lemon Meringue Pie it was. Since I had quite a few Meyer lemons (albeit tiny ones), from my dwarf Meyer lemon tree. Then I thought, maybe I ought to do something more Halloween-appropriate. I know Meyer lemon season is now really, but the bright lemony yellow fruit doesn’t exactly scream “Halloween!” does it?

Chocolate cupcakes? Decorate them to make them look like eyeballs? I could do that, I thought!

I had made lemon meringue pie a few months back, as I adore lemon meringue pie but had somehow never made it. I had then used the recipe from King Arthur Flour but had not quite cooked the lemon filling as properly as I should have, resulting in a slightly liquid-y filling, but it was delicious though…

I decided to stick with the crust part of that recipe (it is a simple crust using oil, no need to stick the dough in the fridge for hours). But went with the filling from this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction – her crust sounds delicious but required shortening which I didn’t have, and several hours’ refrigeration which I didn’t have time for. But since I was using Meyer lemons which are far less tart (and more like a mix of lemon and tangerine, in case you haven’t tried it), I reduced the sugar quite a bit, and added a lot more zest as Meyer lemons smell amazing.

The pie came out wonderfully. The filling held perfectly, and everyone enjoyed it!

Since I was already on the Sally’s Baking Addiction website, I used her chocolate cupcake recipe. The batter was surprisingly thin so I was a bit worried, but it turned out to be a really delicious, moist and chocolate-y cupcake.

(Someone else made apple, peanut butter, marshmallow teeth!)

I also used her Vanilla Buttercream recipe, just 3/4 of it, that is, as I just am not fond of a cupcake that is all buttercream – it looks pretty, but ugh just way too much for me. I went with the lower amount of icing sugar (she gives a range in the recipe), and upped the salt quite a bit, as I really didn’t want it to be too sweet.

Unfortunately, the only food colouring gel I had on hand were pastels, so I had to make do with pinkish bloodshot eyes. 😛

And the final thing to do that day was to finish up the Black Forest cake for the husband’s birthday on Halloween. If you’ve been a reader of my blog for a while, you may know that I make a Black Forest cake every year for the past few years. Here’s the post I did in 2018, one in 2014,  another in 2013 – I didn’t post about it every year, but I have apparently made it since 2013?

Anyway, I use the cake recipe from King Arthur Baking  (and had made the cake layers a couple of days ago, and froze them), and usually I find the sour cherries from Trader Joe’s, but this time they didn’t have any! So I had to resort to frozen regular cherries and made the cherry preserve mixture from Life, Love and Sugar (it did make more than I needed though!) then a simple whipped cream using heavy cream and sugar and a touch of vanilla extract. And decorated with chocolate shavings.

Weekend Cooking was started by Beth Fish Reads and is now hosted by The Intrepid Reader and is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, beer, wine, photographs