Rocky Road Caramel Apples

A girl like me can't just make regular old caramel apples for Halloween.  I'm all about the toppings.  How many calories can we load on one apple anyway?  These Reeses apples are my favorites.

This year I made a rocky road version. Totally Disneyland worthy!

Pretend you don't notice I forgot the almonds.

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Apple Pie Caramel Apples

 Pie.  In apple form.

It's a good idea.

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Gooey Chewy Caramel Popcorn Balls

Chewy popcorn balls are a Halloween tradition for us.  I highly recommend eating them while watching a Halloween movie.  Like maybe a cheesy 90's one with a cat named Binx and references to 'yabos'. 

If you know what I'm talking about, I love you.


These popcorn balls are very sweet and heavy on the caramel.  If you like a higher popcorn ratio you can add an additional half bag of popcorn. These stay soft and chewy even once cooled but need to be eaten the same day.  The popcorn gets "stale" after that so unfortunately these aren't great to make ahead.

This is a recipe you'll want to read through before beginning because if you don't live at sea level you may need to do a little calculation to find the right temperature for cooking your caramel. 

That said, I've made these several times without a candy thermometer, just cooking about 5-7 minutes and they've been fine every time.  They may just stick to your teeth a little more.  :)   I live 4500 ft above sea level so I can't vouch for that happening if you live at a very different altitude, but so far these have been foolproof for me. 

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Candy Corn Krispy Treat Bites

The Christmas music is playing at my house today and the 4 boxes of Christmas decor are all hanging out in the laundry room waiting for that pesky Thanksgiving holiday to be over.

 (kidding.  but not entirely.)  

Christmas is great.  People are nice and I get to buy lots of things and travel and husband gets to take off work.  I am religious so more than anything I love that most of the Christian world focuses on the Savior at this time.   What's not to love about it?

That said, I'm obviously having a panic attack about all these Halloween treats that I made last month that I REALLY want to share with you.  ((But that I also REALLY want to get out of the way so holiday baking can begin.)

 Get ready for a posting marathon my friends!

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Hidden Candy Corn Cupcakes

I learned something today.  Which is,

 If you don't like random people talking to you and staring at you, don't go out in public with a kid dressed up like a mad scientist with white-dyed hair standing 6 inches out in all directions and freaky black eyebrows. 


Obviously.

 Right?


Next year I will pre-arrange my grocery shopping and other errands around children's Halloween parties and the need thereof for them to be dressed like freaks and thus the center of attention.

Don't get me wrong I love this holiday but strangers talking to me and watching me makes me nervous.  The little alert in my head says STRANGER DANGER- STRANGER DANGER.

Also it takes 45 minutes to grocery shop instead of 10 and I'm not great at small talk.


Since I'm pretty sure your kids won't get enough of a sugar high today I thought I'd make you some cupcakes.  You have to cut into the middle first though, for the surprise!

Have a very happy and safe Halloween my friends!!

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Halloween Sugar Cookies

Nom Nom Nom. 

I think my favorite thing about holidays is the sugar cookies that can be adapted for them.  This is the same recipe I used for Firework Sugar Cookies and if you haven't tried it, you need to! They're sweet and satisfying and addictive.

I love this method of piping cookies with regular frosting.  They turn out super cute and it's SO much easier than the royal icing/pipe & flood method.

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Vampire Bat Bark

Halloween is in... 1 1/2 days, and I still have tons of treats to post. No matter what I do, I seem to always be behind these days. The pictures just keep piling up.  Life has been so crazy lately I can't blog every day or two like I want to.  This week for example I've been busy watching my 2 year old throw up all over the table at Chick-fil-a, cleaning up my 4 year old after he peed his pants at a movie night at our friends' house, and biting back curse words while attempting to make my husband's Halloween costume with my electronic cutting machine. (yes... I said husband's costume there.)

Also I've been listening to Taylor Swift's RED on repeat for several days, and buying sparkly champagne colored shoes.

These things are necessary to lift one out of a depression when the temperature plummets down into the 30's.

What's up with that? 

I hope you all have a very Happy Halloween on Wednesday! Don't forget to pick all the poisoned pieces of candy out of your kids bags.  I hear this year that means Reeses, Milk Duds, and Kit Kats.  At my house anyways.  ;)

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Trick or Treat Skewers

Wanna talk about how many bags of candy you've bought to "put away for Halloween"  (but then actually eaten and had to go buy more) ?


Yeah, me neither.


But if you miraculously have some candy laying around, this is a cute idea for it.  You can even wrap the whole stick in a long piece of clear wrap and tie it with a spooky ribbon.

If you live in a friendly neighborhood where your neighbors like you and don't think you're the witch from Hansel and Gretel that likes fattening people up, you could even make some of these to give out on Halloween.


Cause obviously giving children sharp sticks along with their sugar high is always a good idea.

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Candy Corn Bark

I've been such a bad blogger lately.  I blinked my eyes and it went from September to October 19th.  Seriously. 

I had plans to celebrate reaching my half-a-million views milestone.

Yeah, pretty much missed that days ago. 


Can we pretend I made this bark in honor of that?


Thanks to all of you who read along, try my recipes, and leave me comments, emails, and facebook messages to keep me going.  Blogging seriously wouldn't be any fun without you.

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This bark has a nice sprinkle of all candy corn flavored treats, and it's pretty darn good.  I also think it would be super cute if you layered orange, yellow, and white candy melts instead of milk/dark chocolate.  

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Candy Corn Soda

My 4 year old had surgery this last week so I disappeared from the world for a little while.   I decided to clean the house like mad beforehand, make some easy meals and avoid emails, blogging, texting, etc while he was recovering.  Honestly, the last few days have been wonderful.  My mom took my littlest guy and I just got to play with Chase.  We colored dinosaur coloring pages, cut out a pumpkin patch and taped all the little pumpkins up on his bedroom wall, did Lego sticker book, watched Dinosaur Train, read books.  It was heaven.  I found myself wishing every day was like this and that laundry and dishes and errands just didn't exist, and that I could always be the nicest mom ever.  Bringer of Sprite and cookies and narcotics.

That was the plus side.

The down side was obviously the whole surgery bit.  But he took it like a champ and was so brave.  When the anesthesiologist took him I was fawning all over him telling him how brave he was and how I would see him so soon bla bla blah.

 I'm pretty sure he rolled his eyes at me.

At 4 years old he's so much braver than I am.

The weird part is he did a surgery prep class beforehand and asked lots of question so he knew exactly what was going to happen and when the time came he still strutted right into the O.R.

I'm so glad he's not like me.

 


I did a lot of baking before surgery day and I invented this Halloween-y soda for ya'll.  I really did invent it for you because I hate candy corn but I know there are so many candy corn lovers out there.  This soda is made from real candy corn so it tastes just like the real thing.   This may not be the greatest soda to accompany a burger but if you love candy corn you'll love this as a sweet Halloweeny treat.

Anybody else excited it's almost October?

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Mummy Oreo Pops

Want to see some of our treats from our Africa unit?  We ended up doing a lot of Egyptian stuff, because there's really only so much you can do with elephants, savannahs, and soccer.  I looked forEVER for molds I could use to make rice krispy treat pyramids and finally resorted to pressing them into a pan to make 3D triangles instead.  We sprayed them gold with Duff cake spray and placed them on a tray of crumbled graham crackers and added a couple of camels.

 

The real hit was the mummy Oreo pops. We have made these for years so they're nothing new, but so fun for Halloween.

Here are some other things we did: visited the zoo and graphed savannah animals we saw, read about mummies/preserving processes and the kids wrapped each other with toilet paper, read about savannahs and wrote about what we learned, read about pyramids and constructed our own out of marshmallows and toothpicks, made a papyrus out of a brown paper bag and glue and wrote the kids names in hieroglyphics, watched some videos of African music and dancing on YouTube, made a model of the nile and "flooded" it periodically to see how the grass seed we planted would grow even if there was no rain. We also tasted some African food and made some African jewelry to practice patterning.

Chase has started preschool back up so we're slowing down on these extraneous units but he loves them so much I'm going to try to do them when we have time.  Here is my littlest pretending to be a dead mummy for his big brother: 

It's hard to be the smallest!

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Slime Rims

In case you're not in a Halloween-y mood yet, I decided to make it my personal mission to get you ready before October even rolls around. 

I mean, what's not fun about eating candy for a month, chasing your children around Target wearing assorted zombie and Voldemort masks, and decorating your porch with rotting vegetables?  

It's really okay for it to last longer than a month.

I used melon flavored Powerade for the drink above but you can use any drink you want with these fun slime rims.

During our Africa unit I made the kids some "swamp punch" (read: layered grape juice and green Powerade) complete with worms, and slime rims.  They were a hit and sufficiently creepy to convince them that swamps are gross.

Although.

Now that I think about it they may visit Africa someday and be confused when they realize real swamps are not filled with juice and gummy bugs and sugary slime.

It's so hard to be a kid.

Happy Halloween Season!

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Funfetti (Skeleton) Cupcakes

Parties are uncomfortable for me.  Partly because I'm socially awkward, and partly because people usually end up discussing things from the 80's or 90's like Chips (apparently a show and not a delicious snack) and funfetti cupcakes (apparently a rite of childhood passage).  Not having really grown up in this country, half the time I have no idea what's going on during these conversations, so I usually nod and smile and scan the room for something to stuff in my mouth so I don't have to say anything.

Would you believe me if I told you I'd never had a funfetti cupcake before last weekend?  I don't like sprinkles so the idea of them in cupcakes never really appealed to me. 

Turns out they're pretty good.


I made these for my little boy's 4th birthday.  He loves bones and skeletons and all kinds of "body" things.  I love seeing his face light up when I make him something special.  I'm thinking you should probably make these for Halloween with black/orange sprinkles inside and chocolate frosting under the skeleton topper.  (If you don't happen to have a body-loving 4 year old.)

This recipe isn't really "homemade" because it uses a boxed mix, but it lets you add your own sprinkles to a white mix, so you can use any color or combination you want.

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Gingerbread Skeletons with Royal Icing

I love this gingerbread people recipe.  I usually heap the spices a little, and I think the flavor and texture is just perfect.  You can cook them the minimum amount of time for a chewy cookie, or cook them a few minutes longer for a crisp cookie.  My only complaint really is that these will spread a bit, so plan accordingly.  If you have a molasses aversion you can replace some of it with honey or dark corn syrup, but if you use a mild molasses (as opposed to blackstrap or "full flavor") I don't think it turns out too strong.

I like to split my dough into 2 or 3 pieces and roll each piece out between two pieces of parchment (one on top one on bottom) *before* refrigerating.  Then I just put the cookie sheets in the refrigerator. When the dough is fully chilled the top paper will peel right off and you can cut out your shapes right on the parchment/tray.  Then just peel off the excess dough and throw it in the "re-roll pile" and your tray can go right in the oven. No moving the dough and having appendages break off. Let's not make this harder than it needs to be, shall we?

These gingerbread men keep well (you can even freeze them), so it's best to make them in advance and decorate a different day.  For your own sanity, really.

When you make your royal icing, be sure to sift your sugar.  Royal icing is tricky to get the consistency exactly right.  If it's too thick your icing will break or just plain won't stick.  If it's too thin it will "melt" all over the place.  I like to spoon a teensy bit of icing into a cake decorating tip (not attached to any bag) and just push my thumb into the wide end to make it "flow" and test the consistency.  If you spoon all your icing into a piping bag and the consistency is wrong it is a PAIN to remove it all, rewhip and try to put it back in a bag.  Just trust me on this. If you're not feeling up to royal icing's diva behavior you can totally use a different icing or frosting.  I just like royal because it dries rock hard so I can stack these and put them in little baggies for neighbors.

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Caramel Cinnamon Fruit Dip with Bone dippers

Oh look.  Another belated Halloween recipe.  Don't hate me.

This dip is insane.  It looks like it doesn't make a lot.  But it is RICH and it is SWEET.   You'll probably want to throw a few apples in with the bones to dip just so you don't go into sugar shock.  But this is fan. tastic.  Truly.  I like to pretend think I am a pretty disciplined person but I can't stay away from this.

The original recipe calls for Heath bar/toffee add-ins.  I know this sounds delicious but I just couldn't dig it.  The texture without it is wonderful, and the nuttiness it adds just doesn't work. That being said... you can try it if you want.

Enjoy!

PS- You can really eat this any time of year.  You might just have a hard time explaining to guests why you're serving them bone-shaped snacks.

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Eyeball Pretzel Bites

Mmmkay, let's not even talk about how belated this post is.  I had really hoped to have this up in time for Halloween, because it's such a fun, easy, treat for kids to make.  (People always say that, but really, truly, your two year old can help you make these. Without you screaming and lunging across the room every 2 seconds to keep him from diving into a hot oven).

I fell ill with the plague of death (aka a cold) and whined and moaned for about 2 weeks (mostly about how you should be able to buy prescriptions through WebMD since you've al-READY diagnosed yourself.  Psshhhhh. By the way, does anyone else end up with cancer every time they use that thing?  I think there's a slight possibility I'm becoming a cyberchondriac.)

And then I got over it and decided you probably still need this anti-recipe, even though it's late.  You can use it next year.  Or you can find some other excuse to make eyeball snacks with your kids.  I'm pretty sure you probably have a myriad of those.

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