Halloween! Pumpkin Picking, Painting and Sugar

It must be the most be the most basic thing to ever say, but I look Autumn. I pretty much wish that Halloween could be all year round and when I see the leaves start to fall it just makes my little dark heart happy.  

 I always like to have a few Halloween decorations up, bring me all of the pumpkins, the skeleton candles and the cute little lanterns, I’ll use them all. This year we had some of our nieces over to paint some pumpkins, we call this particular group the ‘niece babies’ as they’re the smallest ones. Girl gang goals all day. 

First we had to get some pumpkins, but this time it was my me and the bearded wonder getting it done as it was a bit wet and horrible. We always go to our local pumpkin picking farm, Freshfields. Did I think to wear proper shoes? No. Did I be sensible and let the bearded wonder go and pick them himself whilst I stayed in the car? Also no. I was not going to miss out, wellies or not. I love going to pick them yourself as you get so much more choice of size and colour which is great if you have a specific design idea. It’s usually great for kids as they have stuff going on and you go and get all of those cute pumpkin patch pictures of your kids. I was offering to take pictures of a family doing it as they didn’t have anyone else with, because let’s face it. That’s why we’re all there. Cute pumpkins, cute pictures. 

You know, I really thought it would just be cute when they came around to paint them. Get the niece babies around, do a little Halloween high tea (for the gram, of course) and let’s make some memories! Turns out, getting four little girls together, filling them with sugar and giving them paints was maybe not my best move, but it was fun and I’d like to think it’s something they’ll remember for a while. 

I did a little trick or treat board I saw on Pinterest where you will cups up with bits and bobs and glue them to a board in a pumpkin shape. I forgot about the ‘tricks’ and mostly did sweets, whoops. But it entertained them for a few minutes and was really funny to watch, counting it as a win. Is there such a thing as too much sugar? #auntieoftheyear.

Once they’d gone and we’d cleaned up the expected carnage I started to work on the Halloween treat bags for the girls in my team at work. I always love to give out some treats and make a big deal at this time of year at work. We all dress up and it’s just a little fun morale booster we love to get involved in. I did a supermarket sweep in Morrisons and got some tiny ‘ghost pumpkins’ for their desks, a chocolate apple and lots of little retro sweets. I also ordered some fabulous Hocus Pocus inspired chocolate from Chunkydunkchocs whiwh were incredible (if you don’t know you need to get to know). All packaged up into a Halloween pumpkin goodie bag and they looked pretty impressive at the end if I do say so myself. 

I wore an Interrobang skirt from a few years ago and drew a few spider webs on my face and practically skipped into work for my favourite day of the year. Does anyone else get as excited for Halloween? What do you do at home/work that makes it a bit more fun and not just for the kids?

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This Is Halloween!

It's no secret that I love holidays which involve baking....which to be fair, in our house..is most of them. But with Halloween you get to be really creative, I love making treats for the kids that come to our door - and I'm quite competitive as you know...I like my treats to be the best! This year was no exception, while I was happy with the ones I made last year, this time I wanted to go even further. We even made an effort with the pumpkin carving this year - Jack Skellington and Mr. Oogie Boogie!

There's going to be a lot of photos just to warn you. I made glittery chocolate skulls, bones and pumpkins, sparkly spooky toffee apples and cake pops.

The chocolates were made from moulds bought from Poundland, the skulls and bones were brilliant as they were silicone ones, the plastic pumpkin ones however were a total nightmare and I may have ended up smashing them in frustration when trying to get the chocolates out.  I made them from white, milk and also orange chocolate. The orange chocolate buttons I bought in Tesco and melted easily, had the perfect colour and tasted lovely to boot. I dusted the moulds with cake glitter before pouring in the chocolate which means it stuck to the chocolate rather than everything else it touched.

For the sparkly spooky toffee apples I used the same recipe as last year and decided to make half with a dark green/black colouring to make them like poison apples. Half way through the poison looking ones the sugar crystalised and made the last 4 apples look absolutely horrific!! One was so bad I actually put it in our window on Halloween to scare people! I managed to get 4 apples stage by stage leading up to the scariest of them all.

 From right to left
starting to get scary, getting a bit scarier, not really wanting the eat the next one and the last...
well...there are no words for that monstrosity really.

Below - in all its scary glory!

 Now for some nicer looking toffee apples, no colouring, just sprinkles and some glitter.

Once set I attempted to add some sprinkles and the drenched them in cake glitter to make them look a bit special - to finish I wrapped them in cellophane bags and tied them with curling ribbon, just like from the carnival. I have to say I think the dark colouring was a mistake - they looked burnt even though they weren't but I managed to palm them off on some poor unexpecting boys.

Now for cake pops, possibly my favourite things to make at the moment. For the cake I used some left over red velvet and purple sponge rolled with vanilla buttercream. I decided on four designs - pumpkins, eyeballs, ghosts and Jack Skellingtons. I got a brilliant Halloween theme cake pops set from eBay with orange and black sticks with orange and black twist ties for the bags. They were all dipped in white chocolate, the pumpkins - dyed with orange colouring. The ghosts were easy to decorate with black royal icing as it was only the face but it was hard to keep a ghost shape when inserting the stick...ended up looking like those things in Pac Man but still worked out well.

The pumpkins as I said were dipped in orange coloured chocolate and decorated with black icing and a green fondant stalk - it was quite fun actually giving the all different faces. Next came the eyeballs, these again were fairly easy, using green fondant and red and black royal icing -  a lot of people weren't sure about these for some reason...it's not like they're real eyes or anything! I have the say, the Jack Skellington ones were my personal favourites, the only issue was that I couldn't find my tiniest piping nozzle - my baking room is a mess! So I had to use a bigger one so it's not as fine as it should have been.

I did buy a couple of bags of regular Halloween sweets to go with everything else, I made little goody bags containing one cake pop, a couple of chocolates and a few of the bought sweets. All in all, with the toffee apples I had about 40 items to give away. I ran out in 40 minutes last year so I doubled my loot! What was really nice was that my niece came to help me share them out, dressed in her best cat costume she even got a few goodies to herself!

 

Had a go with face paint for a two-faced effect, my niece wasn't quite sure if she liked it or not!

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