Pumpkin Spice Maggots & Rabid Turkeys

This year I refused to make rice krispie turkeys for Thanksgiving.  I'm officially sick of making them and I don't even like to eat them, so I decided to try something different: Pumpkin Spice Maggots. Although if I was going to make turkeys, I saw they have red & green holiday colored rice krispies which I think would make some interesting zombies.

I bought these fantastic silicone molds at Michaels this fall. They were sold as "mini bug" molds, but I think maggot mold is more fitting.  Sorry but I can't find them available online anywhere, so if you didn't snag some you'll have to keep your eyes open next year. Although it probably sounds a bit cliché, when I purchased them I was dreaming of white maggots for Creepmas.

It turns out I couldn't wait that long and decided to make something suitable for Turkey Day. I'm really not big on the pumpkin spice thing. I mean you won't catch me with a pumpkin spice latte, candles or sex lube. I don't even really care for pumpkin pie, but I thought maybe maggot truffles might be the thing to turn me to the dark side. They didn't.  I thought they tasted good, but I guess I'm just never going to be a pumpkin spice kind of girl.  Other people had more favorable opinions, so if pumpkin spice is your thing you might want to try these recipes.

I don't like nutmeg or powdered ginger, so for pumpkin spice I mix 3 parts cinnamon to 1 part allspice and 1 part cloves.

If you were lucky enough to snag some maggot molds then you probably know each cavity holds a half tablespoon.  It took 3oz of white chocolate to coat 4 molds (24 maggots) and another 3oz to top them off after filling with a heaping teaspoon of truffle mixture. Having worked with a mold or two in my time, I really love these maggots. They are just the right size to finger paint with chocolate and fillings can be loosely rolled into a log and then pressed into the mold.  There's no awkward nooks and crannies to fill and they pop out like a dream.

The maggots picture at the top are from this recipe.  I only used half (1/8 tsp) of the pumpkin spice the recipe called for and of course used white chocolate to coat instead of semi-sweet.  I think more people preferred these, I know I did.  I'm glad I used less pumpkin spice, more would have overwhelmed the white chocolate.  The filling is very smooth and melts in your mouth. One recipe was enough to fill 24 maggots. Also I didn't do a great job tempering the chocolate, that's why you can see a white bloom on some of them. It doesn't affect the flavor, just the look.

The maggots to left used this recipe.  I like the way the darker filling contrasts with the while chocolate.  It tasted more like pumpkin pie to me and because of the graham crackers it was a much denser texture. Only half the recipe was need to fill all four molds. Some people preferred these, so I'm glad I tried them both.







I didn't entirely abandon the rice krispie turkeys, instead I passed the torch onto my kids. They used the 2016 recipe.  The one thing I did, was make frosting to glue the eyes and beaks on.  I thought that would be easier for them to work with than the melted chocolate I usually use.  I was wrong.  Maybe I made the frosting too thick, but it didn't stick to the cookie crumb coating very well and really needed to be pushed on.  My son thought they looked like rabid turkeys foaming at the mouth.  Seems it's just fated for us to have deformed turkeys.

I love the cyclops turkey.  I think next year they should all be cyclops.  

Or maybe we should have a zombies verses cyclops, turkey rumble.

Lastly, I don't know if anyone else is wondering what the hell you do with the rest of your pumpkin puree since the truffles only use a few tablespoons so I'm adding a recipe for  Pumpkin Spice Muffins. Despite my lackluster opinion of pumpkin spice, these muffins are fantastic and with the orange flavored frosting absolutely to die for.  I think this is the original recipe, but I've modified it beyond recognition. I've always used purchased orange juice, but if you were to squeeze your own, I would suggest also zesting it and tossing some in both the batter and the frosting.   

Pumpkin Spice Muffins

3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup white sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup butter softened
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup solid pack pumpkin
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 cup orange juice

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, beat sugar, oil and butter. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add pumpkin and mix well. Sift dry ingredients together and add to the pumpkin mixture alternately with the orange juice. Spoon batter into 24 prepared muffin cups. Bake for 20 minutes or until it tests done. Cool in pans 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack; cool completely.

Orange Cream Cheese Frosting

1 stick butter; softened
8 oz cream cheese; softened
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp orange extract
1 1/2 to 2 cups powdered sugar

Beat first 4 ingredients until smooth. Gradually beat in powdered sugar until desired consistency.

Zombie Turkeys

It just isn't Thanksgiving until the zombie turkeys ravage through the local fowl population.

For those of you who haven't been following along for last umpteen years, I'm contractually obligated to make rice krispie turkeys every Thanksgiving.  It never goes according to plan.  There are always casualties...and blood, so much candy coated blood.

This year two days before Thanksgiving, at precisely the exact moment I was going to make krispie turkeys, I realized I had everything except candy corns.  No worries, I had lots of errand to run, surely one of my stops would have candy corn.  No such luck, but my last stop was near a Piggly Wiggly, which for those of you outside the Midwest is the actual name of a grocery store chain.  Not even lying. 

Anyway, I thought I had struck out there too.  I was on my way out when I saw a fairly deserted "seasonal" shelf and there was candy corn.  Not real candy corn mind you.  That's to say not Brach's candy corn.  Yes, I live with candy corn snobs.  That's a real thing too.  But it's still candy corn and they probably wouldn't notice. I knew that was a lie as soon as the thought entered my head, but if I embraced it I could finally go home.  Next to the candy corn was mixed candy corn.  There was the traditional orange, yellow and white, but there was also ones with some brown and others with red.  I knew in my heart my turkey connoisseurs won't be fooled by the store brand candy corn anyway so I might as well go for broke and have colorfully feathered turkeys.

Lets just say I will not be buying Piggly Wiggly candy corn again.  The traditional ones flavor wise were suitable.  The brown, yellow and white ones had sort of a caramel flavor that was acceptable.  I don't what flavor I expected the red ones to be, but cherry never crossed my mind.  It was wrong.  Sticking them into rice krispie balls would have been nothing sort of criminal.  The worst part was how soft they all were, fine for eating, if you're into that sort of thing, but not for poking into krispie balls. I had a lot of points smush and some corns even split right down the middle.  I ended up poking holes into the krispie balls with the tip of a potato peeler and then pressing the candy corns in.

No matter what there are always some candy corns that won't stay put. I've learned to embrace this phenomenon buying gluing them in with red candy melts.  Some of the bloodied turkeys get to be team Zombie and the rest are team Victims.  The poor schmucks below don't have a clue to what's going on, but ignorance won't save them.  In the end they all get eaten, even the zombies.

I used last year's recipe and at least one person described them as being akin to biting into Heaven. Your mileage may vary.

 

Abomination Turkeys

The bane of my existence is to make rice krispie turkeys every Thanksgiving. My lack of patience and skills in the arena of food decorating usually never fails to deliver, shall we say, unique creations. But I have to say this year, there's not a hideously deformed one in the bunch.  There aren't any zombie turkeys that had to be pieced back together with blood colored candy melts.  I even tried something new which is usually a recipe for disaster.  Even still my husband insisted on eating one of my balls before I "turned them into abominations". 

So here are my cute little abominations...

The Golden Oreo Rice Krispies Treats recipe that inspired these is at piesandplots.net and a nod goes to joyofbaking.com for the addition of vanilla extract and salt. 


Golden Oreo Rice Krispie Turkeys

20 Golden Oreos, divided
1 10oz bag of mini marshmallows or 40 regular marshmallows
4 tablespoons of unsalted butter
3 1/2 cups Rice Krispies cereal
1/4 tsp vanilla (optional)
pinch of salt (optional)

candy corn
mini M&M's
6 white candy melts*
6 red candy melts

Coarsely chop 10 of the Oreos cookies, mix with the rice krispie and set aside. Process the remaining 10 Oreos into fine crumbs, set aside in a small bowl. Melt the butter and salt in the saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the marshmallows and constantly stir until the marshmallows have completely melted. Remove from heat and add the vanilla extract.  Stir in the Oreos and Rice Krispies cereal until all the cereal has been coated. As soon as the mixture is cool enough to touch, with buttered hands start forming it into 1.5 - 2 inch balls. Keep hands lightly buttered throughout this process. These need to be fairly tight and firm, but don't squeeze so hard you crush the cereal. Dip them into the crumb mixture to lightly coat.  Work quickly while the mixture is still warm and pliable.  After they are all coated, roll them through the remaining crumb mixture one more time, pressing the crumbs firmly.

To decorated insert candy corns for tail feathers.  Melt white candy melts to attach eyes. I microwave them in the corner of a plastic freezer bag at 50% power for 30 seconds.  Mush it around and microwave for another 20-30 seconds. Snip of the end of the bag and gently squeeze to apply.  Same thing for the red candy melts to attach the beaks. This year I trimmed the ends off the candy corn beaks.  I think they look better shorter. 

Exhibit A

*Technically I use white chocolate, but candy melts are easier.  See exhibit A where I had to prop up beaks while waiting for poorly tempered chocolate to harden.




Here's last year's variation.  I used the regular Rice Krispies recipe but substituted half the rice krispies with a knockoff brand of cocoa krispies.  Which is funny, because the original turkey recipe that started this whole mess years ago, called for cocoa krispies.  But they are gross, so we make albino turkeys. Well, Mom's Best makes a Crispy Cocoa Rice cereal that actually has a nice flavor. It would still be too sweet to use full strength, therefore the half and half mix, which might sound a little weird, but everyone liked it.  The one problem I encountered was the mixture was really gooey, I'm guessing it's because of the sugar coating on the cocoa cereal.  I added a 1/2 cup more of both cereals and that helped, but I still had a lot of turkeys fall apart once I started stabbing them with candy corn.  If I do it again, I'll use a firmer hand shaping the balls and maybe let them sit for a bit before slapping stuff on.  The result was lots of deformed zombie turkeys last year. 

And the year before I tried sprucing things up with some green candy melts. 

And then there was this cute little guy.  I'd like to say he wasn't eaten by zombies.  I'd really like to be able to say that...and now you are caught up on three years worth of sad little flightless rice krispies treats. 

Traumatized Turkeys

I can’t get out of making Rice Krispie Turkeys, but when I saw these turkey pops, I figured I could change my game. 

As usual I can’t just follow a recipe. I used a modified version of the Rice Krispie recipe on JoyofBaking.com. No one here eats Rice Krispies as a cereal and JoyofBaking.com is nice enough to put quantities in grams, so I’ve been able to do a fairly accurate recipe using a full 9 oz. box. Also it uses vanilla, which I really like.

One more thing about Joy of Baking, it’s really great if you don’t know jack about baking. The recipes are tried and true, with lots of helpful hints. I’ve never had a recipe fail me yet. No affiliation, just a lot of gratitude from someone who had never even thought about baking a cake before having kids.

Traumatized Turkey Recipe

9 oz. box of Rice Krispies® cereal
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
Scant 1/4 teaspoon salt*
17 oz. (67 regular size) marshmallows
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

16 oz. of chocolate (dark, semi, and/or white, whatever you prefer)
Mini M&M’s
Candy Corn

*Sometimes I forget the salt, nobody seems to notice.


Butter a large bowl and set aside.

Butter, a large pot. Melt the butter and salt in the saucepan over medium low heat. Add the marshmallows and constantly stir until the marshmallows have completely melted.

Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla extract. Add about a third of the Rice Krispies, stir until coated. Add another third and do the same. Take care with the last third that you don’t dump in the powdered Rice Krispie crumbs at the bottom of the bag. Stir until all the cereal has been coated. 

Pour the mixture into your prepared bowl. Measure a 1/4-cup of the warm cereal mixture and roll into a ball with buttered hands. You can keep measuring, but I suggest using the first one as a guide and just pull it off with your hands. Rebutter them as needed. I made 60 balls, some were a little a bigger, some a little smaller, who’s ever seen a flock of turkeys exactly the same size?

The fine people at Kellogg's say to place them on a wax-paper-lined baking sheet. Refrigerate about 10 minutes or until firm. That might have helped, we’ll get that in a bit, but the day before Thanksgiving my refrigerator did not have room for 60 turkey bodies and I didn’t feel like rotating them in shifts. 

What I did was gently smush their little bodies down with a cupped hand onto wax paper, to flatten their little bottoms. Kellogg's also says to impale them with lollipop sticks. I think the turkey has been demoralized and abused enough, I’m not poking a stick up its rear. Also I don’t get the obsession with putting everything on a stick. 

In microwave-safe bowl melt 4 oz. of the chocolate. Microwave for 30 seconds, stir, microwave for another 30 seconds and stir. 

If you want to learn about tempering chocolate you should probably go elsewhere. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the suggested methods and then mostly ignored them. I don't finely chop my chocolate, I just break it into chunks.  Then I don’t melt the chocolate all the way in the microwave, there’s always a few chunks left swimming around. I just keep stirring, until all the chunks melt. Maybe not so much stirring as smoothing the chocolate back and forth against the bowl with the back of the spoon. I test the chocolate by dropping some on my wrist, if I can’t detect any heat it’s good, yeah just like testing a baby bottle in fact that’s where I got the idea. Which isn't a completely crazy idea, turns out it's a real thing.

Worst case scenario if you don’t do it right, your chocolate ends up looking a little chalky instead of smooth and shiny. Your real friends won’t care and they’ll still like you anyway. 

Dip each ball into chocolate, allowing excess to drip off. Return to wax-paper-lined baking sheet. 

Again Kellogg's says, “Refrigerate for 5 to 10 minutes more or until chocolate is almost set. Decorate with candy corn for tail feathers and beak, gently pressing candy into chocolate and cereal mixture. Press in white candies for eyes. Let stand until firm.”

I dipped as many as I could with the 4 oz. of chocolate. I didn’t refrigerate, but did let them set about five minutes. While you’re waiting is a good time to trim the beaks. A whole candy corn gives you Cyrano de Bergerac looking turkeys, so I trimmed off about a third. Then you can try putting your M&Ms on, if they stay, you’re good. If they slide down, you need to wait. I did all the eyes first for that set of turkeys.  By the time you've finished the eyes the chocolate has set enough that the beaks will stick.

Here’s is my official technique for getting the stupid feathers to stick in without completely deforming the body (maybe this is where chilling them would’ve helped and then again maybe not), or accidently touching the chocolate trying to keep the buggers from moving around.

Insert the left and right tail feathers in at the same time, with even pressure, angling in just a tad towards each other. Press the beak into the chocolate in front while inserting the middle feather.

Most of the time this worked, some of the time bits fell off. I’ll address that later. Then I continued on working the turkeys in batches of whatever I could coat with 4 oz. of chocolate.  Doing them in smaller batches keeps the chocolate workable. I guessed at how much total chocolate is needed to cover 60 turkeys, because some of my bodies disappeared before I could coat them. There seemed to be quite a few feathers and eyes that vanished while I wasn’t looking also.

So to glue on falling off bits I heated up some red candy melts.

Here are my Traumatized Turkey masterpieces.

You can use the candy melts for good instead of evil. I made a cute little snood for this guy. Sadly he is seconds away from being pecked to death by the bloody beaked, red eyed zombie turkeys. 

Besides the turkeys, we brought a little Creepmas to Thanksgiving this year. I almost feel bad, because Thanksgiving really got shafted this year. I say almost, because if I really felt bad, I wouldn’t have done it.

It’s not every uncle that can truly appreciate the wonder and joy of a musical armpit farting animated zombie, but my kids are lucky enough to have such a one, so when they saw this they knew they had to get it for him. It worked out that wouldn’t see him until Thanksgiving and since that would be a weird Thanksgiving gift, we decided it should be an early Creepmas present.

Most of the family members we see at Thanksgiving we don’t get a chance to see again until spring or even summer and to deny them the tasty pleasure of my brains, seemed wrong. I also made cookie dough filled eyeballs and truffle surprise filled bugs.

I wasn’t completely sure how that would go over, but everyone enjoyed them. The kids (and not just the ones of my own that I’ve warped) were really excited to see eyeballs at Thanksgiving. I think I saw the pumpkin pie getting a little jealous at all the attention they were getting.

I’m thankful to have an extended family that doesn’t mind my quirks.

I’m also thankful my kids don’t have gumballs, a synthesizer and a 12 inch metal spike.

 

Deformed Turkey Treats

I originally saw this turkey years ago when my son was just a little thing and I thought he’d get a kick out of it if we made some.  The first problem I ran into is the recipe says to spread peanut butter on the turkey and sprinkle more Cocoa Krispies® on top for “feathers”.  Yeah, that just didn’t sound good, so I didn’t do that.  Then I discovered what a little bitch it is to get the pretzels pushed in for tail feathers without breaking them.  Only three turkeys got tail feathers before I gave up. So for Thanksgiving we had featherless turkeys. 

The next year I didn’t even think about attempting that fiasco, but I had forgotten the kid factor.  “Mom, are we going to make those turkeys again?” 

I once read in one of those ‘So You’ve Got a Baby, But You Haven’t Got a Clue’ books, that advised to “Start as you mean to go on.”  I took it to mean don’t get into any habits you’ll regret later, with a habit being something you have to do repetitively or at least more than once. I didn’t think it literally meant don’t ever start anything you don’t ever want to do again, and maybe it didn’t, but maybe it did.  Because while my kids have to be reminded daily that they have to pick up their things, do their homework and brush their teeth, it seems if I make a few lousy deformed turkeys one time, and never speak of it again, a full year later they will not only remember those turkeys, but they will expect them every year from then on.  There are quite a few things I’ve done over the years, because I thought it would be fun to try once.  Around here we end up calling those things traditions. 

So following our new tradition I made the turkeys again, without feathers.  My husband and I agreed that the Cocoa Krispies® of the previous year were kind of disgusting, so I used regular Rice Krispies®.  Also, even though the legs weren’t difficult to poke in like the tail feathers, we don’t really eat a lot of pretzels and it didn’t seem worth it to get a whole bag just to make a few stick legs, so I left those off.  I guess I should also admit that my turkey’s had more of a deformed circus peanut shape, than the one in the picture.  That seemingly simple pear shape still eludes me to this day.  I don’t know why.  So for Thanksgiving we had featherless, legless, deformed, albino turkeys. 

And so we went as we meant to go on.

This year I got a little fancy and coated their chubby little turkey bellies with chocolate.  Some in white and some in dark.  I don’t like milk chocolate, and while I’m slowly bringing my children over to the dark side, they’ll balk at dark dark chocolate.  Lindt makes a wonderful sweet dark that’s the perfect happy medium for everyone.  

Nice, but what do turkeys have to with Halloween crafts? Into everything a little Halloween must shine, so I give you turkey zombies.  Decorating with frosting isn’t one of my strong suits, but you get the point and maybe someone with more talent will see this and take it to the next level.  I think I might have liked the richer color of candy melts, but I didn’t have any. 

No actual turkeys were harmed in the creation of this post, but a few Rice Krispies Treats® were horribly brutalized before they met their untimely deaths.