While tucking M into bed tonight, I mentioned that the Halloween extravaganza will continue tomorrow, and she actually groaned! This whole Sunday thing isn’t working out for us. It’s too many days–Friday school festivities, Saturday parties, and then the actual holiday. When I was growing up and there would be multiple celebrations for the same event, like parties in class, with friends, and with family, my dad would say, “It’s a pagan festival!” Which is funny, because, you know, Halloween really is a pagan festival.
But anyway. Yesterday my friend had made some freakishly adorable Mummy Cupcakes for J’s class. I wish that I’d taken a picture, because I just Googled “Mummy Cupcakes“, and none of the pictures were as cute as the one my daughter ate yesterday.
It put me into the mood to be a little crafty, and since I’ve volunteered to bring snacks to church, plus we had two parties to attend, I thought that I’d try to make something cool. I decided to go with Gingerbread Skeletons:
These were a mistake on many levels. First, umm, who likes gingerbread? Well, it turns out that M does, and I’ve been meaning to make a batch of gingerbread to try it again. Not my cup of tea. J thought it smelled good, but then she tried it, and she spit it out. And then she asked me if it was possible that something could be wrong with her mouth. W & I don’t like it, either. I kept decreasing the bake time and it still cooled off into little bricks. Unfortunate: I’m a chewy, possibly-almost-still-dough style cookie. Second, it was just too time consuming. I was supposed to chill the dough for at least 4 hours. I don’t have the patience for that. Third, way too labor-intensive. My hand started cramping from drawing the bones. All of which was a bad choice when I was already feeling grouchy about all of the business, anyway. Still. . . cute, right?
NOW, by comparison a few years back we made a Pudding Graveyard, and that was easy and fun, with plenty of easy kid participation. I think that I’d found the recipe in Family Fun (you can even see the photocopied page), but I couldn’t find it online today. It was basically: a layer of store-bought pudding covered with a layer of chocolate cookie crumbs, then decorated with Milano cookie “headstones”, instant-whipped-cream-and-chocolate-chip “ghosts”, and some of those candy pumpkins.
The kids loved making it, and of course it was tasty. And easy. Clear winner of the smackdown.
In other news, we had our last soccer games of the season, and M finally scored a goal. And my little sister had her baby–a boy!
