Another busy half term week for us and plenty of opportunity for crafting with Halloween coming up next week. My daughter is particularly taken with ghosts, bats and witches cats at the moment, so we’ve gone for the Halloween theme more than I ever have done in my life before! It’s not a British holiday for me, bring on Bonfire Night, much more British!

Anyway, enough of that. As I said we’ve had a busy week, mostly spent outdoors as it’s been dry. However, we had an invitation to a Halloween party over the weekend, so we had to get ourselves ‘in the mood’ with some spooky baking. I cheated a bit and bought a bat biscuit set for my daughter, that just needed butter adding to it. This was great as she’s only 3 and felt like she was really baking, getting completely covered in flour mix – as was the floor and chair! Whilst she was busy making biscuit dough, I made an all-in-one chocolate chip sponge cake mix which I baked in silicon ghost shaped cake moulds.

With the dough complete we cut out the biscuits using the bat cutter and baked everything in the oven. While we waited for the bat biscuits and ghost cakes to cook, we decorated some rich tea biscuits (fast becoming one of our favourite ways to while away some time in the kitchen) with Halloween images. We made some water icing and coloured some orange and then used small icing pens, Halloween cake sprinkles and chocolate chips for added spookiness. I was quite impressed with my pumpkins, the others are all 3 year old imagination at work. What do you think?

My husband bought us a pumpkin and with daughter’s help, hollowed it out. Alice (daughter) gave him the diagram for the face and proceeded to direct the carving process! The finished article is magnificent I think you’ll agree.

We even managed to make sausage and pumpkin casserole, 3 servings of pumpkin soup and a veg soup with added pumpkin! I might turn orange if it lasts much longer.

Happy Halloween xx