Happy Halloween!

As Halloween falls on a Monday this year, we had our party on Saturday. 

I made blackberry-cranberry punch with red grapefruit slices. (Blood orange would have been even better, but I couldn't find one.) I like to make the punch non-alcoholic and let people spike their own glass if they want to. Kraken rum was great in this. The other bottle's Monkey 47, Schwarzwald gin from Germany. 

For the cake this year I decided to trick out a chandelier cake topper I bought from Tiger a few years ago. I think most people don't actually like to eat fondant, so this way I had my fun decorating the cake but the topper came right off when it was time to eat. Above are a few in-progress shots. And yes, I used my sonic screwdriver spork to do the suction cups. It was just the right size. For the cake I used this recipe from the Foodess. It's the best chocolate cake recipe I've found yet. The frosting's a mix of chocolate-flavoured cream cheese, a bit of margarine, powdered sugar, cold coffee,  and cocoa powder. 

Here's the finished product. 

And lit up.

I had to try the monster cookies that have been on everyone's Pinterest this year. My vision was to make them black and white and lemony, but guess what? Even Wilton's paste dyes don't have enough pigment to dye cookie dough black. I ended up throwing out the first batch, which turned out a dismal grey. For the second try I adapted my favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe (just added enough cocoa powder to make it dark and then mixed in the black dye). You could probably use any chocolate cookie recipe, but you want something that comes out a bit lumpy for that monster look. The eyes go on after baking,when the cookies are still soft. 

Autumn-coloured crackers and pecans.

Cheese! You can go for the weirder-looking ones on Halloween. 

I was going for that Victorian botanical illustration look with this pie, but it would probably work better with a smoother filling. I don't like pie crust that much and it always seems to come out undercooked, so this one has veggies and brown rice in it, no crust. 

Vegetable chips and fruit, colour-coordinated :)

For activities, we played a Halloween version of Scattergories my friends had made, a hilarious drawing game called A Fake Artist Goes to New York, and watched the The Thing from Another World, the '50s version. 

So that's my Halloween this year. Hope you have a good one!

P.S. For more Halloween goodness, here's what I what I was up to last year.