Outrageous Pumpkins

Good news - I’m back on Food Network! This time, I’m carving pumpkins on Outrageous Pumpkins! I didn’t win, but I made it to the finale, I carved some very cool pumpkins, I got to work with a great production crew, and I met six other fantastic artists. So overall a fantastic experience!

I won the first challenge with my jack-o-lantern ghost story!

My nesting jack-o-lanterns got me through to the next episode!

Very happy with my zombie self-portrait.

The group haunted house challenge was a challenge, but we won our way through to the next episode.

My arachnophobia pumpkin with a spider eating someone’s eyeball.

The structure of my contortionist pumpkin get me through the the finale!

Pumpkin carving inspired by a toy.

My first time carving an Atlantic Giant! Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey come to life and impaled the birthday kid.

Genuinely one of the most fun shows I’ve ever been involved in!

Creepy Clown Pumpkin

I carved this pumpkins for an interview on local television, as a way of demonstrating how to use other fruits and vegetables in a pumpkin carve. The hair is sweet potato, the nose, teeth, and eyeballs are radishes, and the irises are lime peel.

Rainbow Cake

My niece wanted a simple rainbow-shaped rainbow cake. I wanted to give her what she wanted but I’m very bad at simple, so I made a rainbow-shaped rainbow cake on top of an isomalt cloud with rainbow isomalt supports surrounded by little isomalt bowls full of a rainbow of different fruit curds.

The fruit curds, from left to right, are grape, blueberry, kiwi-lime, lemon, kumquat, raspberry. They were all pretty good, but there is definitely a reason that citrus curds are the most popular.

Inside, it’s a pound cake that I baked in a ring cake pan. I poured the batter into the pan in rainbow layers, so that it was rainbow on the inside as well as the outside.

Julia’s Cake

The book I got this from, Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet, calls this Julia’s Cake. It’s chocolate genoise, soaked with Chambord, with chocolate crème fraîche, vanilla crème fraîche, and fresh raspberries inside, with a chocolate glaze, decorated with more fresh raspberries and ruby chocolate hearts. I made it for my dad’s birthday.

Meatloaf Cake

My sister had to make a meatloaf decorated like a cake for work, so I volunteered to do the decorating. It gave me an excuse to get my flower nail out, which I haven’t used in years because I’m not usually a buttercream rose kind of cake decorator. The icing is mashed potatoes colored with beet juice, which piped better than I expected, though not as well as icing. Once I got down to the #2 tip, the texture really became a challenge.

The really unsettling thing was that, while it looked very much like a cake, it smelled not at all like a cake.

Sushi Pusheen Cake

My nephew loves sushi and he loves Pusheen, so his request for his birthday cake was Pusheen wrapped up in a California roll (otherwise known as Susheen).

The rice is marshmallow piped over top of a chocolate cookie structure. I made the Pusheen cake separately, inserted it into the middle of the rice tube, then filled in the space between the rice and the Pusheen with marzipan krab and avocado and fondant cucumber. The nori is fruit leather, painted with green food coloring. The wasabi is also marzipan and the ginger is just thinly sliced candied ginger. The base is covered with royal icing and is supposed to look like a slate serving tray.

When I made my Rainbow Unicorn Pusheen Cake and my Valkyr Pusheen Cake, they were rainbow colored inside, but the layers of the cake were still flat. This time I decided to make the inside rainbow shaped as well as rainbow colored.

Stuffed Capybara

It’s not quite life size, but it is pretty close.

Pizza Pillow

For Christmas this year, my nephew asked for another in the line of giant stuffed food, following up on the Taco Pillow of three years ago.

Walnut Chocolates

I made these for a dear friend who was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer. The filling is a brandy ganache with carmelized walnuts and a piece of spiced brandied maraschino cherry.

Holiday Candy 2021

This year, I made toasted almond cherry marzipan, pecan chipotle brittle, peppermint marshmallows, port wine marzipan, amaretto ganache, habañero dark chocolate ganache with mango white chocolate ganache, and carmelized walnuts. They all turned out well, especially the pecan chipotle brittle. I forgot I was scaling the recipe when I added the chipotle, so it was about 4 times as chipotle-y as it was supposed to be, but I think it was fortuitous because ultimately my mistake made it a more powerful eating experience.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

My nephew is eagerly awaiting the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, so he wanted to be this character that he saw in the trailer, even though we don’t know their name or anything about them.

Ada-1

For Halloween this year, my niece wanted to be Ada-1 from Destiny 2. It’s a pretty complicated costume and I don’t think I fully did it justice, but she seemed happy and looked pretty cool.

Bat Pumpkin

I had some challenges with carving the wings because the inside of the pumpkin was very stringy, but I’m extremely pleased with the stem for the nose.

Spider Pumpkin

This is my first multi-pumpkin carve. I used a dremel to carve out the spider web on the bottom pumpkin, which is also the first time I’ve used a dremel on a pumpkin. It was a little messy, but also very fun.

Jellyfish Pumpkin

I thought it would be fun to carve a jellyfish pumpkin using the goop inside the pumpkin. I was hoping for a little more goop, honestly, but I still think it’s pretty fun.

Clown Pumpkin

I got some new carving tools and wanted to try them out. Once I had carved it, I thought it needed some painted on clown makeup.

Nectarine Bavarian

I made this for my Mom’s birthday. My nephew kept pointing out that it’s not really cake, it’s more like a big pile of whipped cream, which is not far from the case. It’s mostly bavarian cream, flavored with chambord, with little bits of genoise and nectarines soaked in chambord embedded in it. The center is a big mound of whipped cream. I’m delighted by how much it looks like something you would see in a magazine in the 1960s.

Jason Cake

My niece’s 15th birthday cake features Jason, a character from an expansive world of her imagination. Jason is a Voidspawn, so the cake has a black and purple mirror glaze with silver luster dust to suggest the Void.

Jason is made of gum paste, as is the Casting Circle on top and the spectral hands floating around the cake.

Valentine Treats

These are little heart-shaped mousse cakes that I made for my family on Valentine’s Day. They are almond sponge and lemon mousse with a raspberry center and mirror glaze and dehydrated raspberry powder on top. I was hoping that they would be extremely elegant versions of my Bleeding Heart Cake, but when we first cut them, the raspberry was too frozen to bleed and when we cut another one later, too much of the raspberry had seeped into the mousse, and it still didn’t bleed. So I still have that to work on.

These hearts were the culmination of an entire day of heart-shaped food that I made for Valentine’s Day, which included heart-shaped raspberry pancakes, heart-shaped pizza with heart-shaped pepperoni, heart-shaped deviled eggs, heart-shaped strawberry gummies, heart-shaped mozzarella pockets, heart-shaped meat pies, heart-shaped beet salad, and heart-shaped cheesy breadsticks.

Relatively Successful Entremet

I made this cake for my dad’s birthday, from a recipe in one of my cookbooks from The Great British Bake Off . The layers, from bottom to top, are almond sponge, lemon curd, honey custard, and blackberry gelée. It all tasted good, but I think I put too much gelatin in the custard and the gelée because they were a little rubbery. The recipe was in leaf gelatin and I only have powdered gelatin. Also, the lemon curd wasn’t set enough, so it squooshed out a bit when the cake was cut and later in the refrigerator the top half slide off of the bottom half.