Halloween Candied Popcorn

This is an old family favorite. I had never made it before, so I was a little anxious about it. In the end it wasn't really that hard. We used to make it as a treat for any time of year. But since you can color it, I made it orange for Halloween. However, if you want a traditional popcorn ball, you have to mold it right away. Once the candy hardens, the popcorn doesn't stick to itself anymore. So mine weren't traditional popcorn balls (what I was originally shooting for) but were just baggies filled with yummy candied popcorn.

Ingredients

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup butter

4 tbsp water

1/2 tsp almond extract

Food color optional

Boil sugar, butter and water until it drops off a spoon slow. (After it comes to a boil, it takes about 3 minutes. You just have to experiment to know what "slow" is.) Add almond extract and color. Pour and stir over popcorn.



If you do want to make them into balls, I would possible wear a glove, or be prepared for really gross and sticky hands. It will also be a tad warm. As for the "slow" part, I was totally clueless, but just did my best to see it get a tiny bit thicker so it came off the spoon slower than it did in the beginning. If I didn't ruin it, anyone can make it!

Halloween Ice Cubes

I know the picture isn't very good, but it was hard to take a picture of this.  But it's super easy and the older kids loved finding their worms as their ice melted!

Ingredients

ice cube tray

gummy worms

Fill up your ice cube trays. Drop one gummy worm in each ice cube. You could probably even do 2 in each. Then freeze!

When the ice freezes, you can't see the worms, or I would've taken a picture of just the ice. You can see a dark shape on the bottom of this cup. That's the gummy worm. Joseph loved finding his as he drank his punch. We had tons leftover and he enjoyed ever single one of them for the few weeks after Halloween!

Halloween Mini Pizzas

We had a Halloween party for Joseph and his preschool friends. So I racked my brain to come up with Halloweeny treats for them to eat. This was one which I was very excited about. It's super easy, very yummy, and you don't have to save it for Halloween!

Ingredients

1 can Pillsbury Golden Layers refrigerated flaky biscuits
2/3 cup pizza sauce
1 package sliced pepperoni
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
2 tbsp grated parmesan cheese

Separate dough into 10 biscuits. On cookie sheets, press or roll each biscuit to 5-inch rounds, forming ¼ inch rim around outside edge. Spread about 1 tbsp pizza sauce just to rim of each biscuit. Sprinkle with oregano. Top each with pepperoni and cheese (or other toppings if preferred). Bake 12 to 15 minutes or until crust is golden brown and cheese is melted.

To make the bat pepperonis, I just took the pepperoni slices one at a time and folded them in half. Then I used my kitchen scissors to cut a small half circle out of each end. When you unfold them, you have a bat shape! I used to eat bologna this way when I was a kid. Apparently I'm one of the only ones, but that's okay! You can also use large pepperoni slices if you wanted to make this on a grander scale and not have to cut so many small ones. My mom did that and said it worked great.

These are way easy to adapt to your own topping desires. I love the biscuits as pizza dough. I think they're so addicting! I ate more than the kids did.

Second Annual Haunted Houses

We made these in 2010 too. (I know, it's almost April. Sorry!) I just thought I'd share some of our pictures with everyone. Aaron picked out candy for the houses this year, so except for the requested candy corn and pumpkins, the decorations were pretty random. But the kids still had a blast.

Here's a link to last year's pics and the recipe for the Royal Icing.

Haunted Houses

I came up with this idea a while ago. I was inspired by last Christmas's "gingerbread" houses. So for FHE last night, we made haunted houses. It was a hit. Really easy and quite fun (even for the adults.)

Royal Icing Ingredients

2 egg whites
2 tsp lemon juice
3 cups powdered sugar

Blend egg whites and lemon juice until well blended and foamy. Slowly add sugar while blending. Mix well. If desired, add color and blend thoroughly.


I put mine in sandwich bags and snipped a corner to squeeze out. My first bag had a huge hole, so it was coming out in a big blog. That's the bag I used to put the houses together, so they had a lot of orange goop all over. I used the finer tipped bag to do all the decorating.

Simple structure using graham crackers.

I put frosting on the roof and let him put candy wherever he wanted to.

Then I put frosting on the bottom of whatever candy he wanted for the plate and he placed it.

Peeps makes ghosts, cats, and pumpkins.

He really had a ton of fun. This house is for Grandma and Grandpa Denney.

This is our haunted house, made by yours truly. If you can't tell (Aaron couldn't.) I made spiderwebs on the side and put black M&M's for spiders. It was a lot of fun. And yes, we had some candy when we were done.