Witch's brew dessert recipe for a festive Halloween celebration

Hi Bold Bakers! Halloween is a great time to get creative with desserts and I have a lot of recipes I want to share with you. So I was excited when the folks at Best Fiends reached out to me and asked me to create a bonus video for you featuring a Halloween themed dessert for their game. Best Fiends is a free puzzle adventure game where you collect and upgrade characters by matching same colored blocks to defeat slugs. My husband Kevin and I love playing, I'm a level 45 and Kevin is on 30 so he's got a bit of catching up to do. For Halloween they have slugs dressed up in costumes so it's a great time to start playing and it's free to download. And the slugs are back in their second game in the trilogy, Best Fiends Forever, an adventure clicker game you can now download for free. Sticking with the theme of slugs and creepy Creepy Crawlies, we are making a witch's brew. So let's get started. So the base for our witches brew is tapioca. It tastes really good once it's finished and best of all it looks kind of like frog spawn, it's all bubbly, it's perfect for Halloween. Now I have tapioca here that I soaked overnight and I'm just going to put it into a heavy bottom saucepan. I don't recommend using quick cooking tapioca for this recipe because it's ground up too fine. Next ingredient is milk. Now you can use dairy free milk, that will work perfectly. And then lastly a pinch of salt to add a little bit of flavor. Then what Then what you want to do is turn the heat Once it comes to a simmer, on and just bring it to a simmer. put on a lid and then turn the heat down to the very lowest setting. Now what we're going to do is let this sit here for an hour and very, very gently cook away until it thickens up and it's really lovely. Every few minutes you do want to go in with your spatula and give it a bit of a stir to make sure that the milk isn't sticking to the bottom of the pot. The recipe for this pudding can be found on my website, BiggerBolderBaking.com and go there and check it out because I've got lots of other Halloween desserts there too Okay so it's been an hour and I want to show you what the tapioca should look like. It has plumped up and the tapioca has gone transparent just like frog spawn so this is what we want. So the next ingredient in our pudding is egg yolks. Now these are used to thicken it up and get it nice and stiff. Now if you're vegetarian or you don't eat eggs you can always use cornstarch or tapioca starch to thicken up your pudding. Into the eggs we're going to add in some sugar to sweeten up our pudding and then just give that a quick whisk together. Now into our egg yolks we're going to take some of our hot tapioca mix and then add that in here. And then just give it a mix around once you add it in. This step is called tempering and what it does, it introduces two ingredients that are different temperature so they both become the same temperature. It's really important when you're working with eggs. Okay nice, these eggs have become a little bit warmer. Now all you want to do is add them back in to the rest of your tapioca and mix them all together. Now still over a very low heat, I'm going to stand here and stir this for around 10 to 15 minutes until it thickens up. So after a few minutes you'll notice that your pudding has thickened up really well so I'm going to go ahead and turn off the heat and then we're going to add in our last few ingredients. To give nice flavor to our tapioca pudding, I'm going to add in some vanilla extract. If you don't have it at home, you can always leave it out. Now a witch's brew is always bubbling when you see it, and that's where the tapioca pudding comes in, but now we're going to color it green, so I'm going to take a little bit of food dye, and then just add in as much as you want until you get your desired color. Just look at that, it's kind of like sludgy and bubbly, definitely what we're going for for Halloween. Now just like all of my big and bold desserts, I want to make sure that this tastes great too. Oh yummy. If you like puddings and rice pudding, things like that, you are going to love this. Now I'm going to set this aside and we're going to start to build our Halloween dessert. So I have a little cauldron but you can also use any kind of black bowl. And then I'm going to take some long pretzels, just like these ones, and I'm going to place them around the cauldron because these are going to be the logs. So we've got our logs for our cauldron but now we need our fire. So I've got a piping bag fitted with a star nozzle and I've got some red food dye and I'm just going to run it in lines inside the piping bag. Now this is red but I'm also going to put orange in here as well, this is gonna create nice streaks. Then into our piping bag I'm gonna put in some buttercream that I colored with yellow food dye. So I'm gonna just push it down and then we are going to pipe it in and around the logs. Our next step is to add our frog spawn tapioca pudding. I like to put it almost coming out over the edges so it looks like it's like bubbling up. Now this is where it gets really fun, we get to decorate it with lots of creepy crawly ooey gooey bits for Halloween. I'm going to place a skeleton in the middle. And then I'm gonna put his limbs all around the bowl. Next I have some gummy eyeballs, you cannot have Halloween without gummy eyeballs. Another must for Halloween are brains. Then of course it would not be complete without adding in some gummy slugs, just like in the game Best Fiends. I'm gonna pop in a slug over here, and then I'm gonna put another slug in over here. Oh look at that, all you need was to make a pudding and then have lots of ooey gooey bits to put into your cauldron and you end up with this amazing Halloween dessert. Thanks again to Best Fiends for helping me to bring you this video. The link for the game is in the description box and remember it is free to download. I'll see you back here next week for more Bigger Bolder Baking.