Eats.com - Halloween for the Gastronome: Ivy Bakery

Halloween for the Gastronome: Ivy Bakery

Halloween is all about casting aside your inhibitions. When else is it socially acceptable to dress like a prostitute and gorge on confections that dye your teeth various shades of orange and black? Here at EATS, we fully support the latter pursuit. In our typical quest to move beyond the traditional candy corn and orange foil-wrapped chocolates taking up residence in many a trick-or-treat bag, we decided to investigate local bakeries whipping up Halloween-themed cupcakes, cookies and other indulgences. For the benefit of our loyal readers, we profiled some of our favorites.

Ivy Bakery

Ivy Bakery may have just edged out Bouchon Bakery in terms of creative Halloween treat decorations. From the chocolate cupcake covered in crushed Oreo “dirt” and adorned with a cookie headstone to the Irish potato mice, it looks like someone had a whole lot of gleeful, arts-and-crafts fun with Ivy Bakery’s line of Halloween sweets. Visual delights aside, the treats were also tasty. The vanilla-frosted ginger cupcake, topped with a marshmallow ghost, was slightly dry but full of autumnal flavor. The aforementioned graveyard chocolate cupcake took the proverbial cake, prized for its thick dollop of fluffy, not-too-sweet frosting, and the Oreo dusting was a welcome addition. A vanilla cupcake frosted with strips of white icing to look like a mummy was another favorite, though the red velvet option was somewhat overwhelmed by its cream cheese frosting. And those Irish potato mice? Delicious, once you got past how cute they were—but that’s what Halloween is all about.