halloween 2011!!!

I love Halloween! This year I made my first scarecrow! A few kids actually got scared (and so did I, twice in one day.. actually twice within 10 minutes!) which left me thoroughly satisfied. Planning for this holiday began early for me when I was at Party City and saw Wilton Icing Knives. I wasn't sure what I'd do with them, but I knew it was a good idea just to have them. Then my friend Jon posted this link to my facebook for Frankenstein marshmallow pops. I tried these out before Halloween:
Love those Wilton candy eyes!! I added silver sprinkles as the bolts. I also bought two Halloween magazines--Martha Stewart and Taste of Home. They always have great ideas. Yes, it would be a good Halloween.

Mike and I bought a build-your-own haunted gingerbread house kit from the grocery store.
It came with the walls of the house, black & orange icing, sprinkles, jelly beans, sugar ghosts, jack-o-lantern gumballs and candy corn.

Of course I got into the spirit of things by wearing my bunny ears (we always have some kind of costume lying around).


You can also see our cute Halloween dishtowel on the oven handle.
Well here's the house!
Then we decorated it:
Ooooooh! Spooky! All the icing was dripping off and the decorations (especially the jellybeans) were not sticking. Oh well! We kept it in the fridge that night. Here's what Mike put on the roof:

I thought it was a nice touch! Spooky spider! I took a picture of the 2 of us with our house:


That was that for the house. We almost forgot to bring it out for the party! The day of the party (or the day before, since the big crazy snowstorm pretty much snowed everyone in, giving me more prep time) I made the pretzel rod witch fingers. I got the mold at AC Moore and the candy melts at Michaels (and another bag at Reny's when we were visiting Portland, ME).

This was my first time using two different colored chocolate melts (actually they were both vanilla-flavored, I think) in one mold. They all say to use a brush, but I didn't want to buy a new paintbrush or use an older one even though I washed them... So I just used a spoon as usual but I was very careful, and wiped off a lot of the extraneous parts with a paper towel.

Oooh! They came out so good! :) I put them all together in a jar with some pumpkin pie-flavored popcorn (also from our Maine trip):
Then I made the cupcakes (which is what this blog is really about)!!
Yum! These were pumpkin spice cupcakes from the Sprinkles mix! What I love about Sprinkles is their mixes come in big tubes and have the recipe for from-scratch icing, so you can feel proud & say you made at least some of it from scratch. It also bakes 12 cupcakes, so if you're only expecting a small crowd, you don't have to eat the other 12 yourself ;)

Mike found the wrappers for me--I'd seen them at Stop & Shop and had been looking for them all month, until he found them at Shaw's (again, in Maine). My friend Katherine and I had just been talking about how some wrappers are so cute, but once you bake them, the oil seeps through and you can't see the cute decorations anymore (I think I mentioned this in the post I did about the malted cupcakes). Well these were tin AND in Halloween colors!

I had also bought this cardboard cupcake tower at Michaels. Mike helped me set it up and I put my cupcakes on it, along with the candy knives!

Spooooky! I also put some red icing dripping down the stabbed cupcakes, and on some extra knives I had.
Michaels also had these great wooden boxes in the shape of coffins! I bought two and painted them. I put a Hershey's mix inside and made a little gravestone:
Oh, I crack myself up!
Then I made the marshmallow Frankensteins! The hair kept making me laugh because they ended up looking like nice gentlemen instead of scary monsters.
I ran out of candy eyes :( so I used chocolate chips on some of them. I thought they looked like girls so I gave them red lips! The cool silhouette border is actually a bunch of cupcake wrappers connected to each other. They were part of Chef Duff's cake and cupcake line, but they were too big for my cupcakes. Here's a Frankenstein I gave the Flock of Seagulls haircut to:
We also had spooky cocktails!
I got the idea from Dylan's Candy Bar (which I will post about at a later date). Dylan Lauren has a book out and had these wax lips on the rim of a drink as a suggestion for a Halloween party! Duly noted, Dylan! This was garnishing a cocktail I came up with: pumpkin liqueur, light cream and marshmallow vodka. Yum! It was a party favorite :) I called it Pumpkin Cream. Or, actually, Pumpkin Scream (for Halloween).

Funny enough, the only thing I ended up getting out of the Martha Stewart magazine was the idea for hanging paper bats above the cocktail area.
There was a template and I cut them out of construction paper. How cute!!

And, of course, our costumes (including Mike's cats):

Chunks as a bull, I guess, with a cowboy riding on him! Or just a giant cat with a cowboy riding him... or a regular-sized cat with a tiny man...


My brothers, David (as a bunny) and Hiro (as a Japanese street vendor) with me (Peg Bundy):
And my friends Kim (as Edward Scissorhands) and Katherine (as Little Red Riding Hood)!
There were other friends who I didn't get pictures of, but it was a very fun night indeed. Hope you had a spooky and fun Halloween!!

Cupsatawny Cakes

Happy Groundhog Day!! I heard Punxatawny Phil saw his shadow, which means 6 more weeks of winter! I read today that it has to do with Europeans who settled in Philadelphia and their custom of watching animals come out of hibernation... but I don't know how the seeing its shadow thing makes sense... Anyway, I thought I'd celebrate by making these groundhog cupcakes!!


I started with some chocolate munchkins from Dunkin Donuts, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary (I saw the cups and one of the little logos is Mister Donut--David recently told me that DD used to consist of DD and Mister Donut, but all the MDs changed to just DDs, and MD is now the DD of Japan!) I went to a Mister Donut when I visited David in Japan and they had the most wonderful macarons...

Anyway, I made my usual stop at Fuzziwig's for inspiration. My best find was "popsicle tarts," twin popsicles in tiny candy form! They came in blue (raspberry), yellow (banana! mmm), and white (coconut). The white ones were perfect for groundhoggy buck teeth.


I also got chocolate-covered sunflower seeds (for eyes and noses) and a tube of M&M minis (for ears). Teddy Grahams were also a big part!

I made a batch of chocolate cupcakes and a batch of tiny ones too:

and iced them with white fluffy frosting. I started decorating the small ones by rolling the edges in green sugar:

Then I took the top off a normal-sized cupcake to use the moist inside as dirt. I put that in the middle and stuck a teddy graham in:

I used a toothpick to dot 2 little teeth on his mouth :)

I then did the same thing to the normal-sized ones, but I used the munchkins as groundhogs instead!


The teeth work so well! The thing is, the flavor of the popsicle candy itself is kind of not great... but I told people to take them out before eating the munchkin anyway to avoid a choking situation... It's difficult to stick all the sunflower seeds and m&ms in there without the munchkin crumbling! The fresher the better. It also helps to have a little carton of 30 munchkins when you only need about 5!!

Haha. It's kind of like a Caddyshack cupcake, too.

As usual, I got tired of decorating so I made some "filler" cupcakes: to represent the grassy field the groundhogs are popping out of as they come out of hibernation, I rolled the entire tops of the iced cupcakes in green sugar. Hooray for shortcuts!

Hope your groundhog did not see his shadow! Have fun waking up to "I Got You, Babe" every morning until you figure out the secret to a happy life!