Ghostly Treats

On this coming Sunday, I will be helping our church with our annual Halloween Party. I will be dressed as a nice witch and helping with the toddler games. I really can't wait!  As a good witch I decided to make some treats for my cauldron. I thought about making spiders, but I was afraid the legs would brake off, so I settled on ghost cookies.

In the recent months I have found several blogs I absolutely adore.  One in particular, from Denmark, is fabulous and has so many great cookie and cake designs.  Browsing her tutorials, I saw the remarkable sugar cookies, that are decorated very nicely. She uses royal icing, pipes the border, then floods them. They are spectacular!!!

Flooding.....this brought me back to my days of the Wilton cake decorating classes I took in my 20's.  We learned how to flood, and honestly, I didn't like it. It was messy and I always got air bubbles.  Well, I read this particular guide on how to decorate cookies, and there seemed to be some useful tips.  I decided to give it a whirl.  To my surprise, the tips helped and the ghosts came out very cute and neat.

Three tips in particular helped me last night. The first was to use a hand mixer with the dough hook attachments to make the frosting. I don't know why this works, but it was a breeze. The second was to let the royal icing rest after thinning it for flooding, to let the air bubbles come to the surface.  Finally, putting the icing in a squeeze bottle gave me excellent control when flooding.

I'm going to give the link for the tutorial on working with royal frosting, as she does an excellent step by step guide. Also the sugar cookie recipe I am sharing is a basic shortbread recipe with a few twists. It's a recipe I have been given by a dear friend, but I changed a few things. The result is a cookie that holds up great for cutting out, but also has a tender texture.

Working With Royal Icing By The Cake Journal

sugar cookie recipe

3 sticks of unsalted butter at room temperature
2 eggs
1/2 cup powder sugar
1/2 cup sugar (i used vanilla sugar)
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
3 3/4 cups of flour

Cream together sugar and butter until fluffy.  Add eggs, vanilla, salt and flour. Mix until forms soft dough.  (do not over mix or the cookies will spread during baking). Divide into two discs, wrap in plastic and refrigerate at least two hours.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Roll out dough on a floured surface to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut out desired shape, place on greased cookie sheet, and bake 13 to 15 minutes, depending on size.  Don't over bake, the top of the cookie will be pale, but golden on the bottom.  Allow to cool completely on a cooling rack.

If you are cutting all the cookies at once, keep the sheets refrigerated until ready to bake. If the dough is too warm, it will spread and not hold its shape.

Decorate as desired. I used mini chocolate chips for the eyes on the ghosts. Get creative and fun with this!

tray full of ghosts

Easy M & M Halloween Costume

As the boys get older, I ask them what they would like to be for Halloween.  So this year, when I asked Adam, without hesitation he said a red M & M.  I thought ok, how hard can it be??  So I ventured to the fabric store and bought a yard of red felt and went home.  After about a day of pondering, I decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. After all, if I messed it up, I was only out about three dollars. 

To my surprise, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.  Now, while I am very crafty, I am not terribly handy with a sewing machine. I can sew a basic straight line, and subtle curves, which is all I needed to do with this.  In  hindsight, I realized the whole costume could be done with a glue gun. 

Here's what you  need and how I did it:

supplies

3/4 to 1 yard of felt, depending on size of child (for a child 1 yard, for an adult probably 2 yards)
1 small piece of white felt (8x10 sheet from craft store)
scissors
sewing pins
access to a printer or copy machine
sewing machine, glue gun, or iron-on adhesive tape

Step 1:  Fold the yard of felt in half. Have your child lay down on it with their shoulders at the fold. Draw a circle around them from their shoulders down and around their waist. (Adam is 5 years old and is a boys size 6, I actually only used between 1/2 and 3/4 of a yard.)

Step 2:  Cut the circle out with sharp scissors, cutting the fold so you have two pieces of fabric. Then pin the costume on the shoulders, leaving an opening for the neck. Continue to pin down the sides of the costume, leaving arm openings, and leave the bottom completely open.

Step 3:  Once the costume is pinned, CAREFULLY try it on your child to make sure the head and arm openings are big enough. Then simply stitch, glue gun, or using adhesive tape, secure the seams.

Step 4:  Turn the costume right side out, so the seams are on the inside.  Now on your computer, scroll through the fonts of lower case M's to find one that looks like the logo.  Print out the letter to fill the entire 8 1/2" x 11" paper. If your printer can't print that large, then take it to the copy store and have them enlarge it. (I went to our copy store and the very nice clerk, kept enlarging for me until it fit.)

Step 5: Cut out the "m", now you have a pattern. Lay it on the white felt, trace around it with pen or marker. Cut out the "m" and glue it to the front of the costume. That's it your done!!!

This post has been featured at Craft Gossip.  Linking to these parties!