Cute and Easy Halloween Cookies

 

We won't be trick or treating this year, or giving out candy, because of the pandemic.  It really made me think about how nice a tradition trick or treating is, and how much we miss connecting with our neighbors.

So we decided to make some Halloween cookies to drop off on our neighbor's porches!

We made a cookie a day for three days, starting with the longest keeping cookies.  You can also freeze the cookies as you make them if you were taking more time (which is what I do with Christmas cookies).

Our first cookies were these mummy cookies (possibly because we had just watched Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy).

 

 

 

 

 

Our recipe is here, developed during one of our Ancient Egypt studies.

You could also use any sugar cookie dough- just shape it into sort of flattened peanuts.

We simplified the wrapping marks by making them with forks, and we added little eyes with sprinkles.

The powdered sugar helps accent the wrapping marks.

Next up were eyeball cookies.  

This is ordinary chocolate chip cookie dough without the chips, but you could do it with chips, even with pre-made sugar cookie or chocolate chip cookie dough.

We added raspberry flavor and red food coloring to make them look more monstery, but there are loads of possible color and flavor combinations!

The eye ball parts are white chocolate melting disks with a chocolate chip on top to look like a pupil.

Once baked, the cookies spread a little, but the chocolates held the circle shape nicely.

The raspberry-white chocolate-dark chocolate combination was delicious! 

Lastly we made brownies, mostly because I thought a cookie plate with three cookies has to have more chocolate.  

We used our normal brownie recipe, and then I squirted on some melted white chocolate in sort of ghost shaped squiggles.

I added some fall leaf sprinkles to fancy it up a bit since I thought my ghost squiggles looked a lot more squiggly than ghosty!

Bigger families got more cookies

 

This is what the "plates" ended up looking like (the plates are recycled takeout containers).

We cut out pumpkin shaped tags and wrote little notes to accompany the cookies, then went off and placed them strategically on porches.

Not a normal Halloween, but at least a bit of neighborly connection.

Happy Halloween!

Organization and Pie (Amazing Things to do With Spices)

With all the recent busyness, a lot of regular housekeeping (and blogkeeping) had fallen by the wayside.

My cabinets, in particular were driving me crazy!  I like to get spices in bulk from Penzey's, but could never figure out how to manage all the little bags...

Klenda devised this ingenious system of yarn and clips, and I can't even tell you how happy it makes me!

I can find everything, and nothing spills!  It even made me want to organize my spice rack with all the bottles!

 To celebrate, we made this fancy and delicious apple pie!

You roll a regular crust up with cinnamon, then cut it into spirals to form a super fancy crust.

Did I mention it's made with caramel and Irish cream?

It was beautiful and amazingly delicious!!

Apple-ying Ourselves

 So, did I mention the kids picked 87 pounds of apples?  Five kinds: Fuji, Aztec Fuji, Sun Crisp, Jonagold, and Cameo.

When most people hear this, they respond in one of two ways. 

If they know me, they roll their eyes.



 If they don't, they ask what I am going to do with all those apples.

 It's a lot of apples.








So far: apple sauce, apple butter, apple dippers,  apple pie, apple fritters (which I totally cheated and used as "German Apple Fritters" for our immigrant food project in Awesome History), and we've just eaten a lot of apples!

We also have enjoyed giving away fresh picked apples to our friends and relations.

 And we'll have more apple sauce and possibly butter in our future, definitely more pies and dippers, probably apple cake and apple quick bread, pork and apples, and maybe apple fruit leather.

And we'll keep eating lots of apples!

Klenda made this beautiful caramel apple pie to welcome us home from NJ.

 And, evidently, art projects.  I was informed that this apple has the intelligence of a two year old child that can not speak.

The pear (also created without my knowledge, but by another child) has a similar intelligence level.

They also informed me that this particular apple and pear were "strange."

So now you know.

Seven Quick Takes: Summer Daze

1.  The thing about summer is... I always think it will be mostly like this (lounging about at my friend's pool) and it always turns out to be mostly like cleaning up the back basement. And going on vacation! 

I'm super happy about the going on vacation and honestly glad we cleaned out the back basement, but I am planning a solid day of doing nothing as soon as the Emperor goes back to school!

 2. Oob and I went off on a rambling adventure, looking for some red mushrooms he had seen a while back.

Those were gone, but we found some mushrooms growing in our own yard, and eventually, we called everyone else over to see!

I'm pretty sure I'm the only home owner on the block who hopes to get mushrooms in their yard.

3. Another summer project has been touching up  a large nativity scene.  I recently finished the larger pieces (and stored them in the newly organized basement!), and I decided to have each Zoomlian work on one sheep.

My theory is that if all the Zoomlians ever grow up and move out, every Christmas I'll have a sheep from each of them.

The touch up is not too hard since the sheep started out with a really nice paint job.
 
Although some of their eyes give them a bit of a crazed look. Curiously,  I think this was the look some of my neighbors gave me when I was working on the whole nativity outside in August.

4. Speaking of neighbors, we have a very dear couple of neighbors! 
The gentleman loves to fish- and I mean in a boat on the ocean or bay fishing- and his wife does not like to eat fish.

His solution is to give us (and others) loads of fresh caught rockfish! Truly the best fish I've ever had!

This time he had leftover crabs.  This is a regional delicacy, and I think it's mandatory for Marylanders to love Chesapeake Blue Crabs. We sure do, but usually it's out of our price range!

Which means we hadn't had them in a few years... and Choclo and Oob hadn't really done crabs... I had forgotten how intimidating they are!

But we helped out and everyone got to enjoy crabs!


5. While the older people have been working on projects, Choclo and Oob have been left to their own devices. They always have devices.

I found this on one wall.  It says "Join the Cody Club today!  Awesome outdoor activities, cool coloring stuff and more!"

In another area of the house I found this. 
"This Cody Club game demo should get your attention... MR FILL!  How to play: Fill in the blank spots!  Your pencil is above this sign."

Pretty fun! Mine is the one in the upper right.

6. Leena and I  did the flowers for our parish this weekend!

The flower thing is very fun, but it also is a reminder to me: the only reason we do flowers is that someone asked us one day if we would like to give it a try.

As it turned out, we loved it! 


It's also a direct way for Leena to offer her beautiful creative gifts to God!

The whole experience has made me want to look for other people who have gifts, but are waiting for someone to ask them.


7. This is Oob with his "Summer Drink." 

A Summer Drink has 4 parts:
1. It must have ice.
2. It should have a straw, preferably a bendy straw in a tropical color.
3. It needs a little paper umbrella (you can make one with paper and a toothpick).
4. There ought to be some kind of drink.

And this is Choclo with his look alike sandwich.

Have a great weekend!

More Quick Takes fun with Kelly!

Groundhog Day

This is not an actual picture of the soup I made on Groundhog Day, but it's close.

It was supposed to be alphabet soup with chicken... but then I realized I was out of chicken... but then I realized I had an odd number of leftover meatballs (not enough for a meal, too many to toss). 

So I dumped the meatballs into the soup and called it a day. But it looked odd.

Then I remembered that particular day was Groundhog Day!  It immediately occurred to me to tell the kids the odd meat in their soup was groundhog! I restrained myself.

And then, after they had eaten the soup,  it hit me!  The meatballs had pork!  They really were ground hog!

And now my kids are telling me I ruined their lives.

Kids In Snow!

Snow ice cream!  You take a bowl of fresh snow and mix in a can of condensed milk. Easy peasy and yum!

Gingerbread Step by Step

First off, start three or four days before you need the house. In a pinch, you could do it in two, but if you need it now, buy a kit or make gingerbread men.  The gingerbread men will even taste good!

Also, I wrote what we did, but Day 1 and 2 could conceivably be a single day if you weren't doing much else. In practice, Day 1 for us happens a week or more before we build, whenever we start doodling ideas.

Day 1: Sketch out your idea.  At this point, don't worry if it seems doable, just dream, and think about  how it will look.

In this case, Choclo, Oob, and I were a team, and Oob came up with the idea of a village.

This is a good team idea because different people can do different buildings.  We sketched both the birds eye map and the ground level view.

 Then we planned each building individually.

This involves ideas for special features, but mostly it's the time to figure out what parts you need for the building.

This is also the point at which impractical ideas become apparent (e.g. making the Death Star is impractical because large gingerbread spheres are nearly impossible).

 A master sheet of all the needed pieces helps a lot!  This is when you make paper patterns.

We made our village to scale for gummy bears, which meant our walls were about 3 inches high and 3-4 inches long.


Day 2: Make the gingerbread

 Roll out the gingerbread on foil (or parchment), cut out the patterns, then slide a cookie sheet under the foil and bake. If you don't have to transfer the pieces, they won't break.

If you want candy windows, cut out the window space before you bake, bake, then add crushed hard candy to the space and reheat the (baked) gingerbread just until the candy melts (watch it so it doesn't burn). Alternatively, you could make hard candy and pour it into the window spaces, but that can get messy.

Make royal icing, gather the candy, and decorate the walls.

The key here is that you want to decorate the walls before you construct the house!

Trust us, everything will stick better and you will be able to get better detail if you decorate the walls while they are still flat.

Let it dry a few hours, ideally overnight. If you started early, you might save a day here by building the walls at night.

If not...

 Day 3: Build the walls.

We use a fairly dry royal icing (more powdered sugar but still a little sticky) to connect walls or any other structural support.


On larger projects, we support the walls with jars and cans to keep things square, but the little houses didn't need support.



Let dry at least 6 and preferably 8 hours.

We did walls in the morning and roofs in the evening.

You'll notice our seams aren't very nice.  That's OK because these are construction seams.  We go over them with pretty piping near the end.

Now we wait overnight for the roofs to dry. This is especially important if you built the walls and roof on the same day.

Day 4: Add shingles, royal icing to cover the base, and fancy piping to the seams.

 In fact, now is the time to fancy everything up!

You can add lots of cute gum drops and funny details.  You can make shrubs out of rice crispy treats, and/or trees out of ice cream cones. Marshmallows make great snowmen.  You can melt or make hard candy to make ice or water. It's these fun details that make a good house great!

We'll show you how our village turned out tomorrow!