Pumpkin Ginger Cakes and Chocolate Apples - Baking Mad Review

A little while ago I was contacted to ask if I’d like to take a look at the bakingmad.com website and recreate a recipe. There are so many great looking recipes on that site, and after emailing ideas back and forth, they suggested that I take a particular look at the Halloween recipes. There were several creative recipes within that section of the website. I like the look of the Halloween cupcakes and will probably make some of them nearer to October 31st, but for today I decided to try out a fun activity with the children – Chocolate Dipped Apples…

The children were so excited to be making these straight after school today – as evidenced by the fact that there was “no time” to change out of uniform/coats!!

We had slight issues with dipping the chocolate covered apples in the sprinkles, so we ended up sprinkling directly from tub to apples in the end. Job done!

While the apples were setting, the most importing “job” of eating the leftover chocolate happened…

We ate these after dinner tonight – cute and tasty!!

With all the tempting recipes that are on the site, I couldn’t resist making a couple of others! This recipe wasn’t actually from the Halloween baking section, but it sounded quite “Halloweeny”/Autumnal to me! And of course it featured my favourite ingredient for this time of year... Pumpkin and Ginger Cupcakes…

I did make a couple of changes to the recipe. As you can see in the above picture, I used tinned pumpkin instead of grating fresh pumpkin (same weight, turned out absolutely fine, a lot easier!) and as I knew I wasn’t planning to make the icing (because I’ve frozen most of these for Izzy’s packed lunches), I added the equivalent of 100g milk chocolate chips to the recipe. I actually only made half the recipe and used smaller cupcake cases instead of my usual muffin cases – 13 cute mini cakes!

I could not get the insides of these to photograph clearly, so ended up eating 3 of these in the process, a delicious mistake!! Straight from the oven…

1.5 hours later when cool…

And an outside photo shoot too!!

These are absolutely divine! I will definitely be making this recipe again many more times throughout “pumpkin season”, and next time I’ll be making them bigger…for me!! I’ve already passed on the recipe to my sister-in-law and promised my Mum that I’ll save her one for when I’m seeing her on Thursday! I love the little chunks of stem ginger running through these, and found that the spices were a lot stronger once the cakes had cooled. The tinned pumpkin didn’t add a huge amount to the flavour (I always find the spices are the dominant flavour in pumpkin recipes anyway) but gave the cakes a lovely moist texture, no dryness in these cakes!

Finally, as I knew that Liam wouldn’t eat the pumpkin cakes, I decided to make him some rocky road…

To be honest, I’d been planning to make these for a while anyway, but as I was on the bakingmad.com website I decided to use their recipe for quantities. Their recipe contains brazil nuts which sounds lovely to me, but Liam is very fussy doesn’t like nuts combined with chocolate so I just used 150g biscuits and 150g marshmallows…the benefit of using marshmallows is that at least this is one baked good that I won’t eat!!

Thank you Baking Mad for introducing me to your website and letting me try some great recipes, I’ll definitely be coming back for more inspiration!

Have you ever used the bakingmad.com website before? What is your favourite Halloween, or Autumnal, treat to make at this time of year? My Mum's pumpkin pie is always a winner for me, but I do love trying out new recipes too!

*I was reimbursed for the ingredients used in this post, but all opinions on the website and the recipes I made are my own.*