Monday, November 4, 2013

The Puppet Master and His Marionette

This year, Chris had several opportunities to dress up for Halloween. You already saw the zombie costumes for the zombie bar crawl. We also dressed as zombie bride and groom one night with our running group. But the big costume, the one that took a lot of shopping, sewing and makeup to perfect, was the Puppet Master and his Marionette.
Chris and I had a blast with this. Doesn't his moustache look particularly fetching? We also attached strings to my arms and legs so he could control my movements and make me dance. hahaha We took a video of this, but due to its overwhelming dorkiness, I've decided not to post it. Just use your imagination and picture Chris wiggling the wooden sticks and me flailing my arms and legs. lol
We were invited to a costume party last Friday and had a blast. Here's two party goers, dressed as Skeletor (without his face paint) and a distinguished doctor, I guess.
Here I am in a heated fight with Hunter S. Thomspon. Go figure.
Rockband was a big hit at the party. Even Ash and Pikachu got in on it.
And of course, the Puppet Master couldn't be left out.
The week before Halloween, Chris and I were in a 5K fun run at the state fairgrounds, called "Escape from Fright Nights." They had a costume contest and we even won an award for best team costumes!

This event was a bit colder and we were kind of frozen the whole time. lol But that didn't stop us from getting out there and having a great time.
After the run, we also got to go into all five haunted houses and go on the haunted hayride. Super fun. Although I did put my coat on about two seconds after we finished the race. lol Brrrr!
Not sure how we're going to top these costumes next year, but I guess we have about 360 days to figure it out.
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Friday, November 1, 2013

Halloween Treats

Yesterday I decided to get a little adventurous. I'm not much of a baker, but for some reason I really wanted to try making some Halloween-themed cake pops. Turns out they're not too terribly hard, although I definitely lost a few along the way due to being just too darn ugly or falling apart.

But 9 of them came out pretty cute. Red velvet mummy cake pop, anyone?
For a full tutorial on how to make cake pops, I used these instructions. And this was my inspiration for the mummy design, although I obviously tweaked it. I couldn't find those candy eyes, so I used black gel instead.

I definitely over microwaved my white chocolate pieces at first, so they became crumbly instead of smooth and liquidy. So I had to dump it and start over. And also, I wanted to drizzle the chocolate so it looked like wraps, but I have no clue how you would ever be able to dip those things without having the balls fall off the stick. They got pretty heavy and the stick kept sliding right through the cake.

But overall I'm pretty happy. I like that the red velvet shows through so they look a little more gruesome. haha And most importantly, they tasted amazing with just the right amount of white chocolate coating them.
Since I wasn't sure how they'd turn out, I only used half the cake mix for the cake pops and the other half went into making a dozen cupcakes. I found little chocolate skeleton pieces at Target, so I picked up some chocolate frosting and green sprinkles to make "graveyard" cupcakes. And the results were also pretty cute, I think.
So instead of mixing the filling mix into the cake like I did with the cake pops, I scooped a little bit in the middle of the batter in each cupcake so that there was a delicious cream filling.
Oh, and as promised, here's a picture of our pumpkins outside at night.
This is the only picture I got without a flash and it's a little blurry, but you get the idea. Pretty cute pumpkins, if I do say so myself.
And here's one last-minute decoration I came up with to add a little oomph to our doorway while we handed out candy. It's the candelabra from our wedding, and I just added in a few red candle holders from last Christmas. Funny how wedding + Christmas can make a Halloween decoration. haha
Sadly because of rain, we didn't get as many trick-or-treaters as usual, but we still had a few knocks on the door. And now we have lots of leftover candy...

I've got one more Halloween post coming up. We have a costume party tonight, so tomorrow I'll post some pictures of our costumes. :-)