We all love mysteries and riddles, especially children. Perhaps that’s why the popular Celtic holiday Halloween has caught on in other countries as well. However, the Celtic symbol of the holiday, the turnip, turned into an orange pumpkin. This bright fall vegetable is more familiar to us, and crafts from it are much easier to do. Children enjoy carving Jack’s pumpkin lamp, the main symbol of Halloween. And to make it even more fun, you can arrange a children’s party with fun dishes decorated with “scary” Halloween decorations.
Pumpkin soup with “cobwebs” for Halloween
Of course, kids love sweets more than anything else, especially at parties, but it’s better to start with something healthier, like pumpkin soup. If you serve it spectacularly, no one will refuse such an attractive dish.
Bake a slice of bread and two slices of bacon in an oven preheated to 180 °C. Cut the peeled pumpkin into medium-sized chunks and the two bulbs into wedges. Place the pumpkin, onions and 2 cloves of unpeeled garlic on a baking tray, sprinkle with 1 tsp paprika and 1 tsp curry, salt, pepper and add a few sprigs of thyme for flavor. Pour 3 tbsp olive oil over the vegetables and bake in a 180°C oven for 30-40 minutes until soft.
Remove thyme, peel garlic and add baked vegetables in 1 liter of vegetable broth. Whisk in the blender, add 80 ml of cream and whisk again. Crumble up the bread, toasted in the oven, and finely chop the bacon. Pour the soup into small orange bowls, bowls or pots, sprinkle with the breadcrumbs and crispy bacon. Draw a “web” with heavy cream or sour cream – you’ll need a pastry bag for this. And on the spider web, place a funny spider made from a black olive or make a ghost out of a slice of raw carrot.
Scary chocolate cupcakes with spiders and bats
Pastry spiders and bats are not scary at all, but on the contrary, they are fun and delicious. They are fun to make, because you have to be creative.
Mix 400g of sugar, 210g of flour, 75g of cocoa powder, 1.5 tsp of baking powder and a pinch of salt. Add 2 eggs, 240 ml of milk, 120 ml of vegetable oil and 2 tsp of vanilla extract. Beat the mixture with a mixer, then add 180 ml of boiling water, 40 ml of black coffee and mix well. The batter will be liquid. Place paper cupcake liners in the muffin tins and fill them 2/3 full with the batter. To make do without the liners, use a porcelain cocotte tin. Bake for 15-17 minutes at 180 °C.
While the cupcakes are cooling, prepare the cream ganache. For this, use a hand mixer to whisk 250 g of 33% cream and 250 g of melted chocolate. If you want to make a colored ganache – red, orange, or green – use white chocolate and add a drop of food coloring to the whipping cream. Cover the cooled cupcakes with the cream on top.
Call the children to help decorate the dessert. Attach “eyes” to the upturned chocolates – these can be sugar beads or sprinkles for pastry decorations. They will hold up well if you glue them on with a thick sugar glaze or a couple of drops of melted chocolate. Make spider legs out of pretzel cracker cookies cut in half.
To make bats, separate 2 halves of an Oreo chocolate chip cookie, remove cream, cut 1 of the halves in half, attach “eyes” and a “spout” of sprinkles to the other whole half. Stick the whole cookie with the “eyes” and “spout” vertically in the middle of the cupcake, and place the two halves on the sides of the “snout”, but slightly behind – these are its “wings”.
Pumpkin Chocolate Spider Cookies
Tender and flavorful pumpkin cookies are another perfect dessert for a Halloween party. You can’t tear yourself away from it!
Mix together 330 g of flour, 10 g of baking powder, ½ tsp of salt and ½ tsp each of ground cinnamon and ginger. Now add 100g of cold butter and with your hands, knead the mixture into fine crumbs.
In a separate container, whisk the egg with 100g of sugar until it has completely dissolved. Add 50 ml of 33% cream and 170 g of the previously prepared pumpkin puree and mix well with a whisk. Combine the liquid ingredients with the dry ingredients and knead the dough on a floured surface. Roll out the dough into a 1.5 cm thick sheet. Cut out the cookies in rounds using a cookie cutter or glass and place them on an oiled baking tray. Bake for 20 minutes at 190 °C.
Make a small depression in the middle of the cookie with a teaspoon and place chocolate-covered almonds in it – it will be the body of the spider. You can use melted chocolate, icing, or food varnish (available at pastry stores) to fix the almonds to the pastry. The spider’s head can be made in a similar way with chocolate-covered raisins. With melted chocolate, draw the paws, and with white frosting, the eyes. It turns out very realistic!
Cemetery cake: chocolate horror
This delicious chocolate cake will probably take the first place in the ranking of the most “scary” desserts for Halloween. The name “Cemetery” says a lot… You will have to try and make it look appropriate with mysticism and… fondant.
Combine in a bowl 350g of flour, 50g of cocoa powder, 300g of sugar, 1 tsp of baking powder and a pinch of vanilla. Separately whisk 2 eggs and 120 ml milk. Melt 130g of butter and 200g of dark chocolate in a third bowl, together with 250 ml of water or milk. It is best to melt the chocolate in a water bath, otherwise it may burn.
Add the egg and chocolate mixture to the flour and mix everything well. Butter a baking dish, sprinkle lightly with flour and spread the batter. Bake the cake for 40-60 minutes at 180 °C, checking the readiness with a wooden skewer.
For the glaze, melt 150g of chocolate and 150ml of cream, and pour this mixture over the cooled cake, placing it on the cake rack. You should have some square cookies ready beforehand – homemade or from a store, it does not matter. They make very pretty tombstones, on which you should write the inscriptions R.I.P., Boo, dates of birth and death. , Boo, dates of birth and death. For the inscriptions, fill a pastry bag or food coloring pen with melted chocolate. A very handy pastry bag with three nozzles from the German manufacturer GEFU. With them, drawing on cakes and cookies is a pleasure!
After that, stick the cookies in the cake, and around the “tombstones” crumble any chocolate chip cookies or some biscuit (cut off the thin top layer of the cake before you cover it with icing). The crumbled biscuit looks like fresh earth. But the gloomy atmosphere wouldn’t be complete without the graveyard trees, which you can also draw with melted bitter chocolate, using a pastry bag.
For the drawing, use baking paper – make the trunk thick and the branches thinner, but do not spare the chocolate, the tree should turn out massive. Take the preparation to the fridge for an hour, and then gently remove the paper and place the trees on the cake.
What would a cemetery be without ghosts? To make them, you’ll need large strawberries and melted white chocolate. Stick wooden skewers into the strawberries, bathe the berries in chocolate, and secure the skewers to a piece of Styrofoam. Put the chocolate-covered strawberries in the fridge for half an hour, and then dip the tip of the strawberries in the melted chocolate again to form a tail. Cool the berry again, make eyes on it from lollipops or confectionery sprinkles, and then plant the ghosts on the cake. You can complement the cemetery landscape with small pumpkins made of orange mastic or sugar-orange frosting.
How to decorate a house for a children’s Halloween party
Red pumpkins, pale ghosts, terrifying spiders and bats will be in your house for the holiday, and you must create the right conditions for them.
Spiders can’t live without webs, so stock up on gauze, which you will have to tear chaotically and fix on the windows or in the corners of the room. Toy spiders are sold in stores, especially in mid-October, on the eve of the holiday – let there be a lot of them, and you can plant them on the gauze with double-sided tape.
The horror flying on the wings of the night is definitely about bats, made simply from black cardboard. Attach them to the walls or hang them from the chandelier along with ghosts and witches on a broom.
The table with drinks and food will be especially spectacular if you decorate it in the vampire style – with a black tablecloth, skulls, skeletons, bats. Cherry and tomato juice, poured into clear glasses in the form of skulls, looks scary, and other drinks can be poured into bottles, carafes or dispensers, and glued labels with insidious names – such as “potion” or “poison. Paper labels are better to be “aged” beforehand by scorching them with fire around the edges.
Don’t forget the pumpkins with candles burning inside and the “scary” garlands – these are must-have Halloween classics, as are spiders. The perfect atmosphere – half-darkness, candles, mysterious and spooky music with creaks, rustles and sighs. Costumes, masks, themed games with quizzes, unexpected surprises will add to the holiday fun, which will dilute the mystique a little – after all, it’s a children’s party!