November already!

Wow, time flies by! We are already in November and have just finished the Halloween weekend. And where last year we also set up a few things outside, and unexpectedly had to catch a cow that had broken loose ... this year it was a quiet Halloween for us.

I actually had plans to bake a very tasty cake, and to decorate it completely in Halloween style, but unfortunately not much has come of it due to lack of time. Still, I couldn't resist baking a Halloween cake, and yes, it also had to be a bit Halloween style.

Forgot to take photos

Same problem here, lack of time, which meant that I only really decided at the very last minute which cake to bake. And because I was doing everything in between, I even forgot to take the step by step photos. oops. A person can only be busy with something, and lately that is for me, my painting hobby that I have found again.

In addition, we now no longer spend whole days outside, so these days I am forced to walk the dogs more often and longer so that they can still get their movement and can stretch their paws. My phone has also been failing for a while lately, which leads me to suspect that I should slowly start looking for a new one. When I look at how old this phone is now, I say… it could be. But yeah, I'm really not looking forward to spending a lot of money again.

My camera has been catching dust

Well, none of that matters to you. My camera has been mostly catching dust lately, that inspiration bubbles up a bit now and then, but nine times out of ten I find it even too much work to take my camera out of its bag, and then have to transfer all the photos again to edit the RAW files. Isn't it awful? That a person can change so much in a few months…

Well back to Halloween.

Being busy in the kitchen

So I spent most of the Saturday in the kitchen and was busy making a Red Velvet Cake. Not what I wanted to do in the first place, but it turned out well nonetheless. The decoration has also become very different from what I had in mind at first… but it was this or nothing. It was already around 8 in the evening when I was ready for that part, and if we still wanted to enjoy a Halloween night together with the snacks that I had also made between the acts ... then it had to be just this. The result is shown in a photo above.

And since I completely forgot to take the step by step photos, I think it is especially important that I tell the recipe here. Because even though it wasn't my first choice, this Red Velvet Cake was very tasty, and it also looked very nice with its dark red inside color (Oops again, no photo from that part).

No chemical trick in my stomach

Since we are not people who want to go for food coloring, my partner always calls it, "NO CHEMICAL TRICK IN MY STOMACH", I followed the following recipe:

• 100 g oat flour
• 100 g almond flour
• 2 ripe bananas
• 3 eggs
• 1 beetroot
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• 3 tbsp honey
• 4 tbsp cottage cheese and a few strawberries
• optional: 1 tsp raw cocoa
  
  

YES ... RED velvet cake

And with this recipe my cake came out of the oven nice and red. Although you'll have to take my word for it here, because I didn't take a picture of this either. Forgetful me! So I will also tell you how I prepared the cake.

Preparation method

• Preheat the oven to 100 degrees Celsius and place the baking paper in the cake tin, or do the same as I did and grease your silicone baking tin with some oil
• Puree the banana, eggs and beetroot in the blender.
• Pour everything into a large bowl and mix in the rest of the ingredients (except the strawberries).
• For the chocolate lovers: add a teaspoon of cocoa for some extra flavour.
• Pour the batter into the baking tin.
• Bake the cake in the oven for 50 minutes.
  
  

Then continue with the icing. For that you need the following;

• 200 g of cream cheese (I used Monchou for this);
• vanilla sugar;
• 50 g of powdered sugar;
• 150 ml whipped cream
  
  

Making edible blood

And last but not least I had to make the sauce, which was supposed to represent the blood. And I had already seen many recipes for edible blood, but in most recipes the dye was used liberally. And we're just not a fan of that, we don't want to, and so it didn't happen.

So our edible blood consisted of the following:

• 1 can of strawberries with juice
• Half jar of cherry juice
• Jelly sugar

And I seriously have no idea here how much jelly sugar I used because I made this purely by feel until it was thick enough for my liking but still liquid enough. Logical right? LOL.

When that was finally all arranged, and my partner put the knife in the cake, I just got the time to take a picture, after that we were so excited to enjoy that cake that I didn't even think about taking photos anymore.

Dogs were circling around my cake!

The TV was already on, the dogs were circling menacingly around my cake, my partner had already started eating with relish. In short, the photo-playtime is over, and I had to be quick before the dogs started getting their teeth into it.

Better job next time… but we enjoyed a Halloween night with a Red Velvet Cake made of natural ingredients, which was a perfect match for an undisturbed night of horror in front of the TV.

How was your Halloween?