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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Halloween Baking

I have to say I love Halloween, last year was a bit rubbish as we didn't get any trick or treaters! Luckily I hadn't even made anything, so I got to munch all of the sweets for the next week!

This year however it was on! I had collected some ideas/moulds etc in preparation. We now live in a different area too..full of kids so I was really hoping for some knocks on the door.

I even carved a pumpkin, I hate gutting it out mainly because of the smell...no words can describe it...I'm sure you all know what I mean. But I saw a really good design online and wanted to copy it - a VW camper van! We love these in my house so I had to give it a go. I didn't use a stencil...and you can tell, but I was still really happy with it.

I decided to make bags of treats this year and toffee apples. I can't pass this time of year without making toffee apples, it's that simple, so this was the perfect excuse! I used my Fairground Toffee Apple recipe and added some more red liquid food colouring to make them a bit darker for the occasion.

In the treat bags I made up some biscuit lollipops, pinwheel biscuits, pumpkin chocolates and I also added in some gummy worms for the extra scare factor.

I actually stole the idea for the lollipops and pinwheels from Butter Hearts Sugar, I loved the idea of these and just adjusted the colours to orange and black. The only thing I'd do again is definitely leave them in the fridge/freezer for longer as the first batch didn't keep their shape, I did get the firmed by the end so they did look more like rock.


I made smalled one for the pinwheels and they all came out great as they took less time to firm up before putting them in the oven.

The pumpkin chocolates were actually just white chocolate melted down and mixed with Sugarflair colouring paste in Tangerine. I wish I'd made them a stronger colour but I'll remember that for next year. I think they're really cute though! I put them in the freezer to set and they took hardly any time at all.

I tied them up in clear gift bags and filled my halloween bowl with the treats. I did wonder if I'd made too many, but I thought I'd just take them to work if I did.

It was already dark when I got home and they kids had already started doing the round so I quickly lit my pumpkin, placed it in the window and hoped for the best!

It wasn't long before I started getting knocks, everyone absolutely loving the pumpkin (yay!) and equally loving my homemade treats! I was all out in less than 40 minutes! I did nearly give all of my treats to a little brother/sister duo who couldn't have been older than 4 and 2, vampire and witch - so cute!!!

I then had to close the blinds and pretend to be out so not to disappoint any more trick or treaters! Next year I will remember and double up on everything. I'm loving reading everyone's halloween posts and have definitely gotten some great inspiration.


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