Friday, November 4, 2011

Halloween Fun!

Happy belated Halloween!  It has been a REALLY busy month for this household.  The end of September my mom had major abdominal surgery to remove her appendix and her sigmoid colon.  Then two weeks after her surgery she threw some blood clots to her lungs and landed in the ICU twice and a total of 2 weeks in the hospital.  She is home and doing well now though.  It was a rough month, but we also had some fun.

This year for our ward trunk-or-treat the Young Women were in charge of planning it and I offered to make the cupcakes for our traditional cake walk.  I had so much fun doing them.  I went on a search for "Halloween like" candy and found some good ones.


I found gummy worms and I used upside down octopi for spiders.

Then I found gummy brains:

And nice big corns:

I got a lot of compliments on them.  I sure loved doing them.  I wish I could do them more often, but people don't ask me to.  Anyway, we sure had a good time.

We had our traditional Halloween feast again this year.  I believe this WILL become a tradition, I enjoy doing this too.


We had Roasted Baby Fingers ('Lil Smokey's wrapped in bread), Garbage Salad (coleslaw, probably the best one I've made, it turned out SO yummy!), Cheddar Bones (Cheetos), and Witch's Brew (Lemon Lime Punch with dry ice).  The girls LOVED it!  Later we took Dirt Dessert (chocolate pudding with Oreo crumbs and gummy worms) to my mom in the hospital.

It was a really nice night for trick-or-treating.  It was really warm and we all dressed up.  The girls were little hula girls:


And Spencer and Reed were Curious George and The Man in the Yellow Hat.  I wore tattoo sleeves and a green and black wig with dark makeup around my eyes.  My mom hardly recognized me when I walked through her hospital door.  I got a lot of laughs and comments on my outfit.  I liked it.  I'll use it for future Halloween's.

My chiropractors daughter got married on the first of November, which was Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) and I wanted to give her something special.  She wasn't the typical bride.  She isn't into "show" and "excess" and she was getting so stressed with everyone TELLING her how to do her wedding so she opted to just have the ceremony in the temple and then a lunch with just her family afterward instead of a huge reception.  She was VERY happy with that choice and I'm proud of her for doing what SHE wanted.  I hate it when people try to make someone else's wedding about them.  Anyway, I wanted to make sure she had a cake, so I made a "Honeymoon Cake" for the two of them, just the two of them.


She LOVED it!  I had SO much fun doing it too.  Spencer, of course, did the carving of which turned out PERFECT, and then I decorated it.  It was so fun because the more I did to the cake the better it looked.  I really miss doing cakes.  I mentioned to Spencer that perhaps I should just tell people to pay for the ingredients and then I will make their cakes for them just so that I can decorate more.  I was so rusty on this cake, it was frustrating, but thanks to some big and elaborate decoration I was able to cover most of the mistakes.