Bonfires burning bright, pumpkin faces in the night......

So Halloween finally came around. As I mentioned in my previous post I ran out of time for pre-halloween crafting (so much for the sugar skull wall hangings I had planned for my Rescued Rags shop!). However, I did manage to put together a homemade/vintage halloween party!

I always go slightly crazy on the halloween baking front, which has become a bit of a tradition. As we were having a party this year I went a little cupcake mad!

Bloody Brain cupcakes (from the Lilli Vanilli cookbook used for the Vampire Bite cupcakes). I was a little bit dubious about how good these would look as Ive never really attempted piping icing before, but I was very happy with the end result. They also went down a storm with party guests.

Chocolate Graveyard cakes with gingerbread tombstones (again, Lilli Vanilli) but with my own take on chocolate frosting, replacing fancy American frosting with good old fashioned chocolate buttercream.

'Ghost Cakes' - one of my housemates at uni used to make these, and they have become part of the halloween baking tradition. Really easy fondant sheets and a few blobs of black piping icing.

And gingerbread spiders complete with web plate :)

I also managed to make my costume this year. Halloween has always been a bit of an inspiration for me and an opportunity for me to dress up like an idiot. Previous years have seen Poison Ivy, Warhammer Orks and Zombie Morrisey, but this year I opted for the Corpse Bride. In my terms this was a pretty last minute choice (I usually start planning months in advance) but I think I managed to pull it off pretty well, despite having to explain to several trick or treaters that I wasn't in fact a smurf!

The dress is a vintage shop find which I managed to get for £10! Such a gorgeous 1950s shape, but sadly not quite big enough to zip up all the way at the back. With the help of my equally crafty mother, I added an extra panel to the back to make it fit. I also added some darts in the skirt to lift it up in places to show the net underneath(I have been dead after all!). I also added some beige lace around the neckline to make it a little more like the corpse bride's dress.

The veil was made from scratch, using a pound world alice band and 2 vintage scarves with fabric flowers to disguise the stitching.

Add on some blue tights/sleeves and some blue facepaint and I was good to go! I also dyed my hair blue for the occasion (cant stand wearing a wig for any length of time) but this may have been taking things a little too far!

Happy Halloween everyone!

Vampire Cupcakes

In a slight change from crafting, I have been doing some experimental cake baking. I love baking cakes and after a disastrous first cake made without help (during which I burnt my arm resulting in a permanent scar!) I have got pretty good at it. Decorating them on the other hand is not my strong point.

So I was recently given a book of cake decorating ideas called A Zombie ate my Cupcake by Lilli Vanilli, which, as the name suggests, has lots of gory/halloweeny ideas for the good old cupcake.

I decided to have a go at the vampire bite cupcake as it seemed to be one of the simpler decorations in the book, and didn't require too many ingredients that I didn't already have in my cake making stash.

Step one was to make the red velvet cupcakes, which are essentially vanilla cupcakes with added red colouring (4 table spoons worth in fact!)

As an early halloween treat I bought some orange and black silicone cake cases (fromSainsbury's if you were wondering), which were perfect for this. I get on much better with silicone cases, theres no fiddling about with paper cases, you dont need a separate case to hold the cupcake in place and theres no rubbish. Perfect.

Once the cakes were done it was on to the cream cheese frosting. Following the recipe, it seemed a bit too creamy, so i added a bit more icing sugar to mine.

Next I had to make the cherry sauce for the blood. This seemed a lot simpler in the instructions than it actually was and I ended up spending over an hour trying to get it right!

Task 1 was to blend the cherries with a hand blender. My blender wasn't up to the job and didn't chop up the cherries as much as was needed, which made life much harder later on.

After boiling the cherry mixture it looked more like jam than sauce, and I had to add water to make it even vaguely pipe-able. The lumps of cherry kept getting stuck in the nozzle of the piping bag which meant everything got sticky and the delicate blood drip effect I was going for turned into more splatters of gore.

But I got there. Some of the cakes worked perfectly and kind of resemble the illustartion in the book:
Others, not so much, but they almost worked (and they tasted good!) so thats a start. May be a while before I attempt any of the more complex decorations but I'm still impressed with my progress!