Halloweeeeen!

Hello, my name's Jojo & I used to be a goth. Seriously, for a long time I would only wear black, my hair was purple & my room in my shared house looked like it was decorated for halloween all year round. Some of the gothyness wore off but my love for Halloween (and My Ruin!) has stuck around. I remember seeing this haunted halloween house on Mo's blog a couple of years ago & I remember thinking that it was the awesomest Halloween thing ever! I've got a few friends coming over later to listen to creepy music & eat spooky food so I thought I'd give it a try...

As you can see it's more of a ruined gingerbread house. Y'see I cheated & used an IKEA gingerbread house that I bought last Christmas but never got the chance to make. Unfortunately every single piece was broken when I opened the box. I tried to fuse some of them back together but it wasn't really working so I decided a Spooky Ruined Mansion was the way to go! My gravestones are Speculoos biscuits and the house is sitting on a chocolate cake base with bourbon biscuit frosting & extra crumbled bourbon biscuit dirt. There are spooky snakes, a Sour Patch Kid ghost and I threw a giant plastic rat in there for good measure!

Next on the menu for tonight, Green Gunge Cupcakes.

These are just green dyed vanilla cupcakes filled and topped with green vanilla frosting. I tested them last night & the gunge does indeed squirt out when you bite into them - awesome!

There are sugar cookies too. I used a recipe that I found on the PPK years ago, I remember them being called No Whey's Sugar Cookies but I can't find a link anywhere. I did black cats & pumpkins.

Last night after our tamale feast Nick & I carved some pumpkins. We did one proper one & cut the top and scooped the insides of two others so tonights guests can have some pumpkin carving fun too.

There were tonnes of pumpkin seeds so I washed & dried them and then coated them in olive oil, smoked paprika and chilli powder. I roasted them at gas mark two for 50 minutes turning them halfway through.

Last but not least I made Rat & Eyeball Jelly!

The eyeballs are peeled grapes & the rats are just plastic. There are rats inside the jelly too but you can't really see them in the picture.

The only thing left to make are some mummy dogs, I'm going to wrap some hotdogs in pastry & use little pieces of black olives for the eyes. You'll have to wait until Monday for those pictures though because I have some halloween crosswords & word searches to mount on card, apple bobbing to set up, punch to make, a costume to finish and an anniversary drinks party to go to before tonights gathering!