Hallowe'en baking



Bat wings, mummy fingers, carrots cut in the shape of pumpkins, monster cupcakes and ghost gingerbread - it must have been Hallowe'en!

We love Hallowe'en in our house, can you tell? Every year we do something for it, even if it's something silly at home like dressing up and painting faces, apple bobbing and dancing to Hallowe'en related songs. This year the main focus was on fun and food!



My sister invited us to her house in Dorset to spend the weekend (just) before Hallowe'en. It was the end of half term week and seemed a good note to end the holiday on. The idea was to dress up and play games and watch the Hallowe'en Strictly Come Dancing. I started talking to Merida about the food side of things and we mentioned blood soup and all sorts of grisly ideas. I then logged on to Pinterest and then had many more ideas, as is the way of a good Pinterest search!

Before I knew it I'd created a new seasonal recipes board! So many wonderful ideas. The ones I picked were:

Now, I should point out that a lot of these I used as ideas and put my own spin on. I didn't actually follow the recipes as stated in the links except for the pumpkin pie and pumpkin carrots.

So, the savoury dishes and we shall start with the blood soup. Mwah ha ha ha (evil laughter) Well, simply put, it was tomato soup and we bought it! The interesting point was that it was actually orange but everyone really enjoyed it! Simple, done, next!

Mummy fingers: these were sausages wrapped in puff pastry 'bandages'. We opted for cocktail sausages as opposed to hot dogs as we were having lots of food. I cut little strips of (shop bought) puff pastry and wrapped the raw sausages in them and then cooked them. It took a while to do as they were little and there were 60 of them. They went very quickly and I was pleased the effort was worth it!

At this point I must apologise for the lack of photos of the savoury side of things. They were all eaten so quickly I didn't get a chance. So you'll either have to zoom in on the first photo or use your imagination.

Wiggly worm pasta was simply tagliatelle with green food colouring. The colouring didn't hold well, so they were pale green instead of the dark we'd wanted. We wanted to buy it green but couldn't find it in the shop. Not much of this was eaten, but I think that's mainly because it was plain pasta (although that's actually one of my favourite types of pasta).

Pumpkin carrots: I have to give the credit for these to Frank. He was the one who took on the task of cutting these. So simple, but rather time consuming, yet they were very effective.

Bat wings: these were chicken wings. My sister took charge of these. Some we left plain as we thought our children wouldn't like a marinade. Others she put on a lovely olive oil and herb coating and they crisped up beautifully. On Hallowe'en night we had the leftovers of these in bat wing stew.

Now on to the sweet stuff.

Pumpkin pie: now for this I followed the actual recipe listed. The only difference was having fresh pumpkin as opposed to canned. Once I had the flesh (scraped out by willing helpers) I simply stewed it, with cinnamon and mixed spice in the water, for about 20 minutes. Then I drained it and weighed it and mashed it up into a purée. After this I followed the recipe. It really is a simple recipe as it states. And it tastes good too.

Monster cupcakes: just look at these beauties in their little witches hats!



Basically these cakes were Mary Berry's cupcakes. All we did was make two batches and add some food colouring to each. Believe it or not the purple one was red food colouring and the bright yellow is actually green. The latter does look green in real life but a bright lime green. I don't know what happened with the red! Obviously I need more practise with food colouring!

We let the kids decorate some of the cakes but I somehow managed to not to get any photos of them. I decorated some, having wanted to leave some without icing, with little paper witches hats. It was really easy to do after a few tries!

 

Last but never least was gingerbread. I didn't even look at the recipe linked above because I use my friend's German recipe, which is awesome, but I don't have permission to share it so can't I'm afraid. I got the idea of decorating them in a scary way from the link above. The kids (and some grownups) went to town. We had scary angels and dinosaurs (of course there would be those at Hallowe'en!).



Plus my brother-in law fashioned ghosts out of th gingerbread men. Look at the mountain we made!!

 

 We all donned our costumes and had faces painted (well, most of us) and really got into the spirit of the festival (pun intended). We had such fun and little touches like the Hallowe'en balloons and getting some blackcurrant and apple juice along with some apple and raspberry juice and calling it wolf or vampire blood. 

We've only just finished the leftovers too. Right, that's Hallowe'en done. Now for Christmas. ;-)

Bye,

Josie

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