I’m having some kind of domestic spasm, so I’ll be making treats for Halloween parties tomorrow. If you’re still scrambling for ideas, here are some low-skill treats we’ve done in the past:
SCARY MOUTHS!
Very easy, if somewhat time consuming, and the kids loved them. Apple slices, peanut butter, mini marshmallows. You can also use Nutella for the sticky part, and you can use almonds for the teeth. If you have to go nut-free, you could use pink icing for the gums, but you’ll want to dry the apples thoroughly so it sticks.
You could also use two almond slivers in between marshmallow teeth for a sort of vampire effect. The apples brown a tiny bit but the kids don’t care. If you care, you could dip them in lemon juice after cutting.
PRETZEL ROD WANDS OR GHOSTS
Pretzel rods dipped in candy coating or melted chocolate can be ghost sticks or magic wands. I can’t seem to find a pic of the ghost ones, but here’s the basic idea. You dip pretzel rods in melted white candy melts, or else melt white chocolate and stir in a little melted shortening to make it smoother and harden better. While they’re wet, add mini chocolate chips or raisins or whatever else edible you can find to make faces; or let them dry and pipe face on with dark icing that hardens, such as royal icing.
For magic wands, dip the pretzel rods in various colors of melted candy coating (white, orange, purple, and green are Halloweeny) and melted chocolate with a bit of melted shortening stirred in. While it’s wet, sprinkle on whatever fancy decorations you can find, including sugars, sprinkles, candy eyeballs, candy corn, etc. Kids absolutely love these, especially if you present a lot of different kinds to choose from.
SKULL COOKIES with or without glowing eyeballs
Use this foolproof no-need-to-chill sugar cookie recipe and cut out a bunch of skulls. Frost in white, easy peasy. My kids made these one year entirely on their own. I thought the frosting job they did was terrifying.
OR, you could get a little fancier and fill the eyes with crushed hard candies before baking, so they glowwww spoooooookily. But YOU MUST USE PARCHMENT PAPER TO LINE THE PAN.
GINGERBREAD SKELETONS
If you can’t find a skull cookie cutter, but you can find your gingerbread cookie cutter, you make make skeletons. Here’s a picture from someone who went all out with several layers of icing:
but if you use a dark dough, like gingerbread, and pipe the white bones directly onto the cookie. Or you could make regular sugar cookie dough and mix some food coloring in. Pipe the bones on with white and you have cute pastel skeleton guys.
THROWING UP PUMPKIN
And one year, I’m not proud of this, but we did make the incredibly classy throwing up jack-o’-lantern, with a mini pumpkin and guacamole. You could also use queso instead of guac. Again, I cannot find the picture, but I think I even sprang for the fancy purple corn chips.
How about you? Did you make any rash promises? Any disasters to report?
I have not eaten pretzels or gingerbread in a long time.
Ha. No. My sister sent me pictures of all the things she made for her (adult) Halloween party, which included pizza skulls and a brain cake that was disgustingly realistic. I, meanwhile, was asked to bring cookies and banana bread to the school party tomorrow. I I made chocolate chip cookies and briefly considered adding candy corn to the cookies because our neighbor gave us some pumpkin-flavored candy corn, before deciding that that would just ruin the cookies. And that was the extent of my festive ideas. All the crafty impulses were gifted to my older sister, obviously.
Oh man. I didn’t have ideas, but I kinda want to try some of these now…
My creativity has been devoted to costumes this far. Hubby is going as a D&D dungeon master (a geek costume with a hood I made), I’m going as a bard, and the kids are a knight (black, orange, and purple cardboard helmet…so I guess he’s a Halloween Knight) and a princess. I’ve been blowing through my old bedsheet stash to sew costumes.
One year I got the bright idea to make the “mummy dogs”–hot dogs wrapped in strips of croissant dough–to put out with a veggie platter and some fruit, in the hopes of laying down a solid base of something-not-like-candy and with a smidge of protein before trick or treating. They were a huge hit and now, apparently, are a tradition. Even the cynical 19 year old looks forward to them.
So I’ll be making those, along with maybe making the veggie platter into a skeleton. Maybe. The past three years I’ve been saying I’ll do that, but I somehow never get around to it. However, we carved our pumpkins today, so that clears out my schedule some for tomorrow. Right now everyone is mainlining roasted pumpkin seeds, which they also love beyond reason or merit.
We’ll probably also put together the blasted Trader Joe’s Haunted cookie house today, the one my adorable 8 year old put in the cart before I knew what he was doing.
Pizza skulls! I found the recipe last year and loved the idea, but everyone was sold out of the skull pans (it was mid-October or so). I saw the skull pan in Target last month and threw it into my cart so fast I’m surprised it didn’t break. I already made them once this year and the kids begged me to do it again for Halloween proper. https://hungryhappenings.com/halloween-recipe-stuffed-pizza-skulls/
Welp. My husband suggested we stay up late to introduce the kids to The Lost Boys, and it is indeed a fine flick, but we ended up going to bed at 1 am. The rest of the family are morning people and I…am not. In penance, he suggested we go out to eat instead of me slaving over tubes of crescent rolls and frankfurters. Sold.