“I’M WASTED now,” shrieks Helena Garcia. “I’m wasted here!” The former Great British Bake Off contestant is lamenting the fact all the children on her street have had the gall to grow up and become teenagers – they no longer care for her spectacular Halloween endeavours.
“Last year I made a real effort, and not one knocked on my door,” she says, mock despairing.
Unfortunately this year, thanks to the spectre of Covid-19, trick or treating looks to be a total no-go. That doesn’t mean you must forgo the magic of All Hallows’ Eve entirely though. Carve that pumpkin – and then pick up Garcia’s debut cookbook, The Wicked Baker.
It offers many a ghoulish – but tasty – way to celebrate, and features bakes that, without exception, have a “spooky twist”. Some are just plain ingenious, like her Cousin Itt baklava, whose Addams Family shroud of floor-length hair is recreated using Greek pastry kataifi (“Basically shredded filo”), which Garcia constructed amid a pastry surplus following the making of breadstick broomsticks – because of course.
There’s a haunted Yule log (a tree stump appearing to howl), truffles masquerading as eyeballs, eclairs iced with entombed mummies, and lemon and thyme cupcakes that writhe with (modelling chocolate) sand worms. Don’t expect edible maggots or blood-drenched sponges though; Garcia draws the line at gory bakes. “In relation to food, it really is off-putting,” she says. “I’m not a gore junkie at all.” However, she has stretched her own rule with a batch of cinnamon rolls made to look like brains, as “it was too good [an idea] not to!”
Born in Spain, Garcia went to high school in Las Vegas, ostensibly to learn English, but it was there, surrounded by desert and high rollers, that she picked up her penchant for baking, and for “flavours like cinnamon and maple, pecan and pumpkin puree. I love them.”
Living with a family of Mormons, who, unlike many an average American family, would cook everything from scratch, she was swept up in a world of community bake sales, and – already crafty – got utterly hooked.
“It was amazing, absolutely incredible,” she says, recalling her Las Vegas school days. “It’s just every scene you see in teenage movies or in sitcoms – [that’s] pretty much the real thing.”
Her interest in Halloween, however, is less the gaudiness of America’s traditional, plasticky blowout and more to do with the history, tradition and aesthetic of “Celtic festivals and paganism, magical plants and anything witchy.”
And while she might like the gothic, slightly macabre side of things, fun and wit run just as strong in her. “I just want to be able to have the best time possible,” says Garcia. “Humour is very important in my life. It’s in my bakes and everything else.”
Take her affinity with Bake Off presenter Noel Fielding (“We’re both idiots – I feel like if we had gone to school together, we would’ve been inseparable”) and that time she famously told Prue Leith: “They come to me ’cause I’m dead,” when the judge reached to pluck a fly from her hair. She’s since even made a cameo appearance in US mockumentary horror comedy series, What We Do In The Shadows.
“At the time, when you’re [in the Bake Off tent], you’re like, ‘This is the most stressful thing I’ve ever done and I can’t bear it’,” she continues. “And then you’ve gotten away from it and you’re like, ‘That was the most amazing experience’.
“I was able to take criticism really well,” she says, considering what she learned about herself on the show, but adds with a laugh: “I found that I dealt with the pressure well on the outside, but inside I was melting. I think they didn’t show how nervous I actually was!”
Her Bake Off family have proved one of the most tightly knit yet too. “Every day, there’ll be a couple of phone calls,” she says happily, although Covid has put a stop to their meet-ups, but not to Garcia’s enthusiasm for making and doing. She’s been busy picking blackberries (“it’s like treasure hunting”) and foraging for mushrooms as she did as a child, when she’d look for milk caps in Spain’s pine woods (“I belong to a mycology club where everybody pretty much is retired apart from me, but I love it, absolutely love it”), and growing all sorts in the garden of her Victorian home in Leeds.
She hopes Halloween will be an opportunity for people to get creative, but is adamant there’s no need to restrict spooky baking just to October 31.
“Horror movies or mystery movies don’t just come out at Halloween,” she points out.
Having a bit of a lark with baking – be it in the construction or the decorating – is what’s key. “That’s the funnest bit,” she says. “You can bake a cake just to eat it, or make something out of it that you will enjoy and be really proud of.”
The Wicked Baker: Cakes And Treats To Die For by Helena Garcia, photography by Patricia Niven, is published by Quadrille, priced £12.99. Below are two recipes from the book for you to try.
MOON WITCH BLACKBERRY PIE
(Serves 6-8)
300g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
1/2tsp salt
1tsp icing sugar
225g unsalted butter, cut into cubes
4–5tbsp ice-cold water
1 egg yolk, for brushing
For the filling:
800g blackberries
100g caster sugar, plus extra if needed
1tbsp cornflour
1tsp lemon juice
1tsp ground cinnamon
1tbsp ground almonds
Method:
Pulse the flour, salt and icing sugar together in a food processor a couple of times to mix. Add the cubed butter and pulse until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs (alternatively, do this with your hands).
Add the water, one tablespoon at a time, until the mixture forms large clumps and holds together when you press it.
Dust your work surface with flour and tip the dough on to it. Knead a couple of times,form into a ball, flatten it, cover in cling-film and refrigerate while you make the filling.
For the filling, combine the blackberries, sugar, cornflour, lemon juice and cinnamon and leave for 15 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 170C fan. You will need a 23cm pie dish.
Divide the pastry into two portions, one slightly bigger for the base of the dish. Roll out the larger piece on a lightly floured surface to a 3mm thickness and use it to line the pie dish. Cover with cling-film and refrigerate while you make the top. Roll out the remaining pastry and cut out a flying witch silhouette, a crescent moon and some little stars using a paper template.
Sprinkle the ground almonds over the base of the pie and top with the blackberry mixture. Top with the cut-out shapes and brush them with the egg yolk. Bake for 30–35 minutes until golden brown. If the top is cooking quicker than the bottom, cover with foil. Serve hot.
COUSIN ITT BAKLAVA
(Makes 4)
200g shelled pistachios, chopped
1tsp ground cinnamon
Pinch of ground cloves
450g kataifi dough, thawed
4tbsp butter or vegan spread, melted
For the syrup:
300ml water
450g granulated sugar
Peel of 1/2 clementine
1 cinnamon stick
To decorate:
Small amount of shortbread or gingerbread dough
Boiled sweets, crushed
Black fondant icing
Method:
Preheat the oven to 170C fan and line a baking tray with baking paper. Pulse the pistachios, cinnamon and cloves in a food processor a few times to combine and chop the nuts. Don't over-process.
Make sure the kataifi dough is completely thawed. Unroll it and, using a sharp knife, divide it into four 25cm portions.
Take one portion and pull the strands apart to make them fluffy, then brush a little melted butter on to one half of the portion. Spoon one-quarter of the pistachio mixture on the bottom portion and fold the other half over. Shape with your hands to get a rough cone-like structure.
Repeat the process with the rest of the pastry, then place all four Cousin Itts on the prepared baking tray. Bake for 40 minutes, or until the pastry is crispy.
For the syrup, heat the water, sugar, clementine peel and cinnamon stick together in a saucepan over a medium heat. Once the sugar dissolves, simmer for three to four minutes.
When the pastries are ready, remove them from the oven and ladle the syrup over the top. Cut out the glasses from the gingerbread dough, using a small round cutter if you have it, and a slightly smaller one to take out an inner circle. (Alternatively, use a small, sharp knife.) Make four sets. Place each on a lined baking tray, fill the inner circle with crushed boiled sweets and bake in the oven for seven minutes or until the sweets melt to form ‘glass’.
Mould four bowler hats by hand using black fondant icing.
To attach the glasses, melt some more of the crushed boiled sweets in the oven and use them as glue – don't touch the molten sweets with your bare skin!
