Pre-Halloween Craft Party

On the weekend I had some friends over for an afternoon of Halloween cupcake-decorating and pumpkin painting (and an excuse for more gross punch) and an All Hallow's Read Secret Skeleton.

Having tested some cupcake designs earlier, I decided the best ones were the Owls and the Creepy-Crawlies, so I got the stuff for those and we started with those. Then we improvised, with extra help from a bag of lolly facial features.

First up, here's the punch. Another round of frog spawn punch...

...and a second go at eyeball punch. The colour wasn't as good on this eyeball one because I mixed in some juices and soft drinks with a less vibrant colour.

Then later the colour leached out of the black jelly at the bottom and turned it all disgusting. Plus the eyeballs were starting to disintegrate.

Secret Skeleton was fun. We had struggled with knowing appropriate age books for kids, but it seemed to go ok.

Then we started on the cupcakes. Owls and creepy-crawlies (including chocolate-coated sultana ants)

Then the moustaches and mouths came out!

Oh no! I ate a bug!

Early Christmas Special - Demon Rudolph.

And with the most mutated mouth award, demon zombie panda.

I wanted to try painting on pumpkins this year for a few reasons. One, as I mentioned in my introduction to this year's Halloween series, is having no desire to set fire to anything in my house. Also it isn't dark when trick-or-treaters come. Also, good carving pumpkins are not easy to get or cheap here. I carved a Queensland blue once and it was very hard physical labour. So I picked a pumpkin I like to eat, and we painted instead.

Can't wait to eat some pumpkin.

I blatantly copied mine from the colouring-in sheets I'd printed for the kids.

What a fun Halloween-y day! Although I think we all had severe sugar crashes.

Cupcake decorating tests for Halloween

After my cupcake-decorating hens night, we were keen to do some more, and Halloween was agreed on as the perfect occasion. And so my pre-Halloween Craft Party was planned. Today I tested out some decorating ideas.

First, I wanted to try making red velvet cupcakes using my mum's recipe which uses grenadine. After putting a few ingredients together and getting this gross-looking concoction, I knew the Halloween baking was off to a good start. Now I need a recipe that looks like this when it's done!

The first decorating idea was creepy crawlies. This comes from "Hello Cupcake" by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. I used an icing pen for the legs and antennae, where I think they use chocolate, because I happened to find one while shopping for ingredients.

Then the bodies are made out of M&Ms.

I stuck to centipedes and spiders, but in the book they do ticks, scorpions and ants as well.

Things I learned - centipedes need longer legs than you think, and a bend in their body to look creepy. The redbacks managed scary easily enough (well, scary for something made of sugar).

Next up was eyeballs. Inspired by this lady on Martha Stewart. I had some trouble with the eyeballs. The pupils are slices of soft liquorice, the irises and red streaks are bits of jelly snake. The problem? The snakes kept wanting to straighten up again. Any suggestions?

Then I switched to cream cheese icing and some brains. I saw some on Pinterest and it looked so easy! At first my icing was too runny and the brains sunk and lost their shape. Even when I thickened it up it still wasn't as easy as I had imagined. (I kinda hate people who make the beautiful foods you find in cookbooks and on the internet. It looks easy. I just can't do it!)

Then some owls. These are also from Hello Cupcake.

Again, piping the feathers etc was harder than it looked (I've done that before though, and maybe butter cream icing is a better consistency for it) and my oreos just wouldn't come cleanly apart! But it is a super-cute design so I think it still works.

Looking forward to trying to perfect some of these designs next weekend at the Craft Party.

Oh no not another potential hobby!!

My most amazing bridesmaids, or "Matrons of Awesome" as I also like to call them, threw me a superfantabulous Hens party yesterday. We had a cupcake-decorating class at my friend's house, followed by dinner, and it was an inspiring way to spend a day. I love learning new things, and as always I got very excited by it and have lots of probably-doomed plans to do a lot more of this.

We each made a monkey, a lion, a zebra and a cookie-monster face. In my house, we have already eaten cookie monster!

This is my monkey and lion. My monkey's head was too small and his neck was too long, so I gave him a scarf. Scarves proved popular with several monkeys suffering the same condition. This is almost the perfect camera angle to hide the bad bits of my lion.

My zebra:

All four of mine, including a crumb-covered cookie monster:

Here are Rhiannon's:

Here are the rest that I got photos of:

 

Best Hens night ever!