Happy Halloween!

I hope everyone had a scary (and safe) Halloween this year! 

Halloween isn’t very popular in Australia (although more and more Aussies seem to be celebrating in recent years).

But that doesn’t mean you won’t see Halloween stuff in the shops, or trick-or-treaters on your doorstep. 

We haven’t celebrated Halloween in a few years – not since my ever-popular zombie cupcakes and spider pumpkin dulce de leche cupcakes, anyway. 

Psst… for mains I always cook this white chicken chili.

Did you even realize that my zombie cupcakes are featured on the Bake It Pretty product page for the zombie hands? 

That totally blew me away when I saw that!

Well, since my kids are getting older, I decided to treat them to a Halloween feast last night. 

The day before Halloween, I bought a sackful of decor from a dollar shop and decorated our dining room table with spooky stuff while the kids were at school.

I then got to work on some Halloween desserts, which I really had a lot of fun with. 

I started with these bloody zombie cupcakes, made especially for my 5-year-old son, who, for some reason, has a thing for zombies.

These are red velvet cupcakes with lemon cream cheese frosting; the clotty, gelatinous-looking blood is actually boysenberry sauce! 

For my son’s amusement, though, they were zombie blood cupcakes with bone frosting and fresh zombie blood. 

He took it rather seriously and thought they were pretty cool!  I haven’t used these zombie hands since 2009, so I had a lot of fun incorporating them into these cupcakes. 

The recipe for the cupcakes comes from Brown Eyed Baker, but I used Philadelphia’s brand new cream cheese frosting to make the process a bit quicker. 

The cupcakes and frosting were really delicious together, and the fresh blood boysenberry sauce (which was store-bought) added a nice little fresh touch. 

As previously mentioned, you can get the zombie hand cupcake toppers from Bake It Pretty.

Next up were these witches’ fingers. 

These cookies were a major wow-factor for the entire family, and, unfortunately, were a little too creepy.

Everyone refused to eat them!

They scared my 3-year-old, even after I had repeatedly assured him that they were just cookies. 

My husband took one bite and decided he couldn’t handle eating the rest. 

What a sissy! 

Anyway, they’re just a basic sugar cookie dough with a bit of green food coloring mixed in; the blood is just red icing gel; the fingernails are blanched almonds. 

I was actually quite impressed with these. 

It was amazing to make these witch fingers because they do indeed look quite life-like!  The recipe comes from Annie’s Eats.

The kids came home to see these cupcakes and fingers on our Halloween-themed table and they were simply delighted! 

They continued to talk about it and gather around it for the entire rest of the night!

For the savory foods, the kids got to help once they came home from school.  We made deviled eggs with olive “spiders”… (and I had to reference my guide on how to thicken deviled eggs while I was making them!)

I used my own recipe for the deviled eggs and I got the olive “spider” idea from She Knows. 

This was pretty easy, but it was time-consuming chopping the olives and getting them in the right place for that spider effect.

And lastly, mummy pizzas and hot dogs!

We put a little too much cheese on our mummy pizzas, so after they baked, it all melted together and it didn’t look so mummy-ish anymore! 

We love cheese though. 

This idea came from Curry and Comfort.

The mummy hot dogs were easy, but a little tricky to do as the weather was so warm, which made the pastry sticky and difficult to work with. 

We still got those dogs wrapped up though, and they were the most popular of the savory food. 

This idea came from Damn Delicious.

The only thing we were unlucky with last night was that we only had 3 trick-or-treaters! 

Last year, we had so many that we ran out of candy. 

We’re in a different house this year, however, so I’m presuming there either isn’t a lot of kids around our neighborhood.

Or Halloween isn’t celebrated much in this suburb.

Oh well, at least the kids had a fun Halloween feast and a great spooky night!