Well, Halloween has passed, and we’re just three weeks from Thanksgiving. I feel like autumn is slipping away. Halloween is one of my favorite times of year, though, so here’s a slightly belated post on my favorite scary cupcakes.

They’re my favorite… and also the only ones I have pictures of. My significant other and I used to have a birthday tradition of cupcakes. We also spent a good part of our adult lives together in Hoboken, where he worked just down the street from Carlos’ Bakery, of Cake Boss fame. I walked by that place for years on my way to the Barnes and Noble (gone), CVS, and the Path train. Of course, I begged a cupcake off him on his way home from work for any special occasion I could justify. His birthday is October 30th, so I would promise him an NYC cupcake in return for a Carlos’ Halloween treat.

That is, until the show Cake Boss came about. These photos are from 2008 because that was the last time we could actually get in to the bakery to buy something without standing in a ridiculously humongous line. Believe me, we tried. I have photos of the line.. but no photos of the cupcakes. It’s a bummer. No more will I stand on the corner of Washington and Newark and smash a cupcake into my face. (Don’t ask.)

Of course, these photos being from 2008 also has another implication. This was just 5 months after I got my SLR camera, and I had no macro lenses. These photos were shot with the kit lens, a really slow 18-55mm, before I knew anything about proper lighting and styling.

Halloween cupcakes

So, in 2008, I traded Lou a Whole Foods spider cupcake for a Carlos’s ghost cupcake. I love this photo because the ghost looks very worried. I think he thinks the spider is going to eat him, despite how positively friendly the spider looks. The spider reminds me of a puppy with his googly eyes.

Ghost cupcake from Carlos's Bakery

It was a red velvet cupcake with a fluffy white icing. I can’t remember how it tasted, but I always liked Carlos’ cupcakes. The cake was moist, the icing was supple. Nothing mindblowing, but solidly good.

A triptych of anxiety. Look, he has a lot on his mind. I mean, he’s dead, and he’s a cupcake.

Spider cupcake

And the spider. Well, he was adorable. Many a time had I admired the Whole Foods cupcakes from their glass case. They’re gorgeous, whether they have seasonal designs or flowers. I’ve had beautiful Whole Foods birthday cakes at work covered with vivid icing blossoms and leaves, and they were tasty, too. However, this cupcake.. well.. I think the Whole Foods icing takes color and shape so well because it is essentially lard. It is pure grease with no flavor at all, like what you find atop those tiny cakes at a Chinese Buffet.

You would suspect that the disk on top of the spider was a cookie of some sort, but no, it was just another lump of icing-lard dusted with cocoa. It was disgusting to bite into it. Truly. What about the cake? Well, it tasted like cornbread. Dry. Corny. This was an absolutely terrible cupcake. I’ve been turned off  WF cupcakes for life.

I’ve mentioned Sweet Avenue Bakeshop several times on this blog. They make wonderful vegan cupcakes. I don’t go out of my way to eat vegan, but I DO go out of my way to eat weird, and to eat good. This compels me to always try unusual things, like vegan cupcakes, and to keep eating delicious things, like these vegan cupcakes. Sweet Avenue is also right in my town and caters to my fickle tastes by having new, ridiculous flavors constantly – lavender, margarita, lemonade, etc.

I was in there in July to try a whiskey and coke cupcake and picked up a s’mores cupcake, too, in case I didn’t like it. It had marshmallow frosting, a swirl of chocolate, a chocolate-dipped graham cracker, and a marshmallow creme center. The presentation really sold it, because I honestly don’t like s’mores much (though I DO love chocolate-covered graham crackers. Who’s with me?).

Vegan s'more cupcake from Sweet Avenue Bakeshop

I love this shot’s soft lighting. It’s unusual for me. I usually go for high contrast shots with obvious specularity, like in the picture above.

Softly lit cupcake

The cupcake looks particularly dark and decadent here. I like how the graham cracker provides a backdrop for its own cupcake.

Side shot

Remember how old cartoons had someone spinning a swirling umbrella to hypnotize people? That is what this cupcake is doing. It wants you to eat it. Now, there’s a bit of a challenge here. How do you eat it? Graham cracker first? Icing first? Icing with graham cracker, or graham cracker separate? Do you try to eat some of the cupcake with the icing? The graham cracker basically adds another dimension to the age old question of whether you lick the icing off, THEN eat the cupcake, or eat both at once.

Hypnotizing cupcake

This doesn’t look terribly delicious, but I enjoy the colors and shapes. The background has contrasting angular lines, but the foreground is full of curves. There’s only three colors: black, white, and brown. It  has a  modern aura.

Inevitable close up

The cupcake was delicious, of course. The icing is always thick and pillowy at Sweet Avenue. It wasn’t my favorite type of graham cracker, but that’s fine – I was there for the cupcake. Who doesn’t love cupcakes filled with even more frosting, too? This shot reminds me of the good things in life.

Gooey marshmallow filling

Northwestern New Jersey is full of many wonders. It’s nothing like the factory-littered alleyway that the turnpike cuts through, or the dirty montage in the opening of the Sopranos. We’re called the Garden State, and this part of NJ is full of farmland, open spaces, barns, zoos, the Delaware Water Gap, the Appalachian Trail.. etc. When I go out there, I like to visit the Chatterbox, a 1950s-style restaurant that is round on the outside and filled with old movie posters on the inside.

They sell diner-like food: burgers, shakes, fries, chicken fingers, and whatnot. In the summer, they’ll even bring your food out to your car to keep the drive-in vibe going. We opted to go inside and ordered a cheesesteak. As you can see, they finely chop the meat, then add onions and peppers with a cheese of your choice on top. In this case, Lou opted for mozzarella. The fries were hot and fresh, which always makes me happy.

Cheesesteak from the Chatterbox

Staring down the barrel of a cheesesteak..

Melted cheese on a cheesesteak

I got a malted chocolate shake. I couldn’t taste the malt, but the shake was really thick, of medium chocolatiness, and topped with homemade whipped cream. The whipped cream was the best part.

Chocolate shake

They are generous with the serving, as you can see. It looks swirly like it came out of a can, but the color and taste really made it seem like it was freshly made. I ate it by the spoonful.

Tower of whipped cream

Naturally, I started off the meal with a salad. Vegetables make all dietary indiscretions go away, right?

Salad from the Chatterbox

The Chatterbox’s great vibe is helped by its frequent antique car shows. They hold them every weekend during the summer, with special evenings for Corvettes and motorcycles. These events are so popular that I’ve seen plates from New York and Pennsylvania, and they have a booth outside grilling hamburgers because the restaurant can’t keep up with feeding all the people there. The amount of vehicles is staggering; they circle the building several times, then spill out into a grassy lot behind the restaurant. I’ve seen Model-Ts, old volkswagens, cadillacs with the wings on the back, antique pickup trucks, and more. They pop the hood on them all so you can marvel at how immaculate the engines are. They make engines look beautiful – nothing like the leaf-laden, black mass beneath a modern car’s hood.

Cars at the Chatterbox

I had a birthday recently and decided to take a break from my Colorado photos to post photos on my cake. If you’ve read this blog before, you know I love cake. Among cake, my true love is buttercream birthday cake. When I get cake in the supermarket, at parties, in the store, it is all with the comparison to birthday cake in my mind.

I grew up in a predominantly Italian town in New Jersey (shocker!). We had a lot of good pizza within 5 minutes and a very special Italian bakery about 15? minutes away. Baldanza‘s is a standalone bakery by a bowling alley on a main road covered with aging stores and strip malls. Despite the raggedy appearance of the area, you smelled this bakery every time you drove by. The scent of baked goods managed to penetrate even your closed windows. It was awesome.

One of my favorite parts of this shot is the rounded poof of frosting in the lower right corner. Very elegant.

When my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, there was nothing on my list, because I generally don’t want a lot, and if I want it, I just get it myself. However, this cake had been in my mind for awhile. I hadn’t had it in maybe 10 years, and now that I had a hobby of photographing food and writing about it, I realized everything was falling short when compared to my beloved Baldanza’s cake.

The first reason I hadn’t had this cake in so long was because, as you may know from my About page, I lost about 100 lbs a few years ago and basically abstained from anything delicious for 5 whole years. (3 to lose the weight, 2 to keep it off.) I’ve since introduced all foods back into my life so this was no longer an issue.

The second reason is that I lived at least 90 minutes from the bakery. My mother had also moved at least 45 minutes away, so I asked her for the cake, but told her not to do it if it would be a pain. As you can see, she came through. She drove down to the Jersey Shore in the wee hours of the morning, picked up the cake, then tried to drive home while holding it in the passenger seat so it wouldn’t fall off and die a tragic death.

Mm, birthday cake.

The extra variable in this equation is the summer heat. Summer + buttercream = melting cake. She packed cold sodas around it to keep it cool in desperation.

Luckily, it worked! I got my cake, and I was so very excited. As you can see, it is white Italian buttercream, lavender flowers, and lemon filling. Yes, lemon. My many, many cake tastings in the past 5 years have brought me to a very unusual conclusion: I love lemon filling. Not chocolate. Not strawberry. Lemon. Something about the brightness of the taste cuts through the buttercream in the most delightful way.

Action shot! We cut the cake.

The icing on this was great. I’ve had many low-quality buttercreams in my life, and that doesn’t even count ‘bettercream’, which isn’t pretending to be the real thing. I’ve even made my own buttercream in search of the perfect icing, and it’s just not the same. I usually make American buttercream, which is just butter+powdered sugar, and this was definitely NOT that. I also suspect it was not French buttercream, which uses egg yolks, because it was so white. That leaves Italian buttercream or Swiss Meringue buttercream. They’re both very similar and basically add corn syrup and egg white. I would guess, since this was an Italian bakery, that they used Italian buttercream, but who knows.

Glistening buttercream

It’s a fork shot! I ate my flower first, and the buttercream tasted as I remembered it; delightfully smooth, sweet, with no taste of butter. My mother detected a hint of rum in it, and I agree that there was more than a vanilla flavoring there. I want to emphasize that it’s not the taste but the mouthfeel and the whole experience. This buttercream might not make you blink until you’ve had so many bad ones, and then you really appreciate it.

My purple flower

More cake shots after the jump.

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I went to a candy-and-curiousities shop in Montclair, NJ on a whim. They had some interesting home decor, like an aged, iron crown, and little knick-knacks like a magnetic turtle that could take a bottle cap as a shell. Far in the back, they sold chocolate, and this is where I spied these gumball animals on the bottom shelf. They were just so cute that I had to get some. They were 2.95 each, a little pricey for what is simply a quarter-sized gumball and gum paste, but the detailing is really delightful. I got a butterfly, a panda, a dinosaur, and a dog. (I also got this cool new wooden serving tray from Pier 1.)

Gumball critters

The gumball is prominent on the butterfly but more more hidden on the rest so you start to forget what they really are until you look at the back.

Gumball behinds

The butterfly is my favorite. I like the tiny little flower and the pastel colors.

Gumball butterfly

This dog reminds me of Clifford. I like to imagine he is a little shy, all curled up like that. The facial detail is great; that smile is perfect.

Pink gumball dog

I have no idea what this critter is supposed to be. I like the dog in the shot kind of side-eying it, thinking, “I don’t know what you are, either, mate.” I think it is a dinosaur because the pink frills don’t make sense. Otherwise, I’d have said a rhinoceros.

Purple gumball dinosaur??

Here is our panda! I really liked him as well. This is a full frontal shot so it is a little bland, and with his eyes so wide and his mouth open, I get a “!!!” feeling from him.

Gumball panda

Two more photos after the jump.

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I haven’t been going to as many farmer’s markets as I’d like this year. They hold one every Wednesday in my town in the afternoon, but it ends at 6 which is precisely when I get off my train after work. I’ve recently been to one in nearby Montclair which was fun; I got two delicious cider donuts, some ras el hanout (a Moroccan spice of cinnamon, clove, cardamom, coriander, etc), and a few sugar plums. Yes, sugar plums really exist, and people grow them! They actually weren’t as sweet as I anticipated from the name.

Here is a bounty of peppers. The pale green ones on the left are cubanelles, a sweet variety.  The very slender green and red ones on the right are chile peppers. I didn’t know that until I looked it up – I assumed they were super long and wrinkled jalapenos. I also didn’t know that apparently red and purple peppers are just ripened green peppers. The longer you let the pepper sit on the vine, the more color it takes on; however, that means  a longer time-to-market and a diminished capacity for making pepper seeds, so letting peppers ripen to other colors is more expensive.

Peppers at a farmer's market

That round, purple vegetable is a Rosa Bianca eggplant. I wish I had known that when I took this picture. Rosa Biancas are Italian heirloom eggplants that are creamy, mildly-flavored, and have no bitterness. If I knew such an eggplant existed, I would have bought it in a second; I love when my eggplant gets all creamy and squishy after a long braise in tomato sauce. If there is no sauce, I definitely taste the bitterness. I try to salt it out, but I don’t think I give it enough time. This variety sounds like a great solution to both issues. Probably good in a stir-fry. This is why I need to go to more markets – to try out awesome produce like this before the season ends.

Eggplant at a farmer's market

And this is what we get after we buy the vegetables. Oh, how I love sauteed squash. I grew up in a house that only ate canned vegetables, so my first taste of sauteed squash happened in a college cafeteria. It was love at first bite. This dish came from La Taverna, an Italian restaurant in Dayton, NJ that serves some pretty tasty food in a nice historic setting.

Sauteed veggies at La Taverna

I love the char and the speckled pattern on the zucchini.

Sauteed squash at La Taverna

Ice Cream Charlie’s is a traditional icecream shop on Park Avenue in Rutherford, NJ. The icecream is homemade, and they have two long cases full of hard icecream and two machines doing softserve. One of the soft-serve machines will sometimes do flavored fat-free, sugar-free icecream which is so, so good. I think my favorite was some almond or hazelnut flavor. My favorite hard icecream flavor was also quite unusual – lemon ginger chiffon. It was lemony, spicy, but so light and creamy, not acidic or biting at all. I had it as a shake, and it was just perfect.

On my latest trip there, I decided to opt for another exotic flavor – Peach Melba. I actually didn’t know what it when I ordered it. I remembered it was Australian, and I assumed it was a peach-pie type of deal. I was incorrect; it combines peach icecream with raspberry streaks, so you get the smooth, floral flavor of peaches, then little pockets of the sharper, sweeter raspberries. It was quite tasty, so it was a good mistake. It was invented in the late 1800s by the famous chef Escoffier to honor a visiting Australian singer.

You can see the touches of purple throughout it here.

Peach Melba icecream

Here is a closeup so you can admire the drippy goodness. I love, love, love softened, melty icecream. I don’t want to chew my icecream – I want it to melt in my mouth. I have this evil habit of digging out the sides of all my icecream cartons because that’s where it is softest. I leave behind a core of hard icecream. If I’m really enjoying myself, I even flip out the icecream so I can skim the softened stuff off the bottom as well. I know, I should get help. Does anyone else do this?

Peach Melba closeup

The same Baker’s Bounty tent that supplied me with my rugelach in the last post also had danishes. I selected a walnut one because it looked the most interesting. It tasted very plain; just a regular danish with walnuts on top. A fruit or cheese danish would have been a lot more exciting, flavor-wise, but harder to photograph. They were a little messy looking.

Walnut danish

Danishes were originally known as wienerbrød. Don’t get too excited; it just means Viennese bread.

Walnut danish

I love how the trio of walnuts looks here.

Walnut danish close up

I soon noticed something curious.

Walnut Wilbur?

This has happened to me before.

I went to an arts and crafts fair in Brookdale Park in Montclair on Saturday. If you’re in NJ, check out rosesquared.com – they run several excellent art shows all over the state, so one might happen near you.  There is a lot of jewelry, artwork, and photography, some pottery, sculpture, and clothing, and a row of food trucks so you can get your grease on. It’s not snooty at all.

While I was there, I passed a tent for Baker’s Bounty. They had danishes, cinnamon buns, pound cakes, focaccia pizza, cookies, and muffins all piled on a white table. I had to stop and peruse their wares so I could bring something home to ‘photograph’. This is my new excuse for eating. I got a plate of rugelach, which are Jewish pastries that are rolled around fruit, nut, or chocolate filling. This plate had strawberry, currant, and peach flavors. They were pretty tasty and bite-sized, so you could have one, wander off, and then try another.

Here is me stacking the food again.

Tower of rugelach

These were covered in nuts, curiously.

Peach rugelach

At first, I thought these were raisins, but they were too small and a little hard, so I’ve settled on currants.

Currant rugelach

Here is the stonehenge of rugelach. That sounds cool and ominous, right?

Rugelach

These dishes were the entrees from my lunch at the Highlawn Pavilion a few years ago. My mother ordered the steak, and it was pretty tasty. It looks so plain, right? You’d expect them to get fancier with it, but I guess they know they don’t have to. I don’t think the people ordering it are after strange sauces and foam. Even when I ate at Per Se, they kept this dish extremely simple, to their benefit.

Steak and potatoes, Highlawn-style

Can you find three types of potatoes in this picture?

I ordered the fish in an attempt to be healthy. My significant other also hates all seafood so I can only get it at a restaurant. This was Striped Bass, which I had much higher expectations for. Those disks are purple Peruvian potatoes. I have no idea what it is garnished with — is that marjoram? Young oregano? Clover from the lawn? Help  me out. Anyway, I don’t remember eating this, and my notes at the time were ‘just average’.

Striped Bass at Highlawn Pavilion