Halloween Part II - 2010

Halloween Part II. We had Varian's family over for dinner. Our costumes stayed the same, and points go to my mother-in-law Michaela for best family costume. She came as Trinity from the Matrix. Here's a picture of Oma and Opa as well which cracks me to look at.

And definitely some points should go to Cameron (they were Bella and Edward from Twilight) who printed out Edward sayings from the movies and would randomly quote them throughout the night.

I attempted to make a Jack-o-lantern cake using bunt pans to give it that nice pumpkin shape. My sister Katie had done it- see a picture of it in her blog HERE - but then she is an amazing cake decorator. I frankly struggle just icing a cake and have shockingly little experience at doing even that. So my pumpkin attempts were a bit of a disaster. First of all I decided not to make two bunt cakes because I thought that would be way too much cake for the amount of guests we had coming. So I decided to cut it in half and lay it down on a plate. I did make a delicious carot cake with cream cheese frosting - so at least it tasted good, but it was really hard to frost.

 

I was trying to do the frosting while Jaren was napping. At that stage, he'd always wake up if I used the beaters. I had just laid him down and I ran into the bathroom to close the door and whip up the frosting then. I also panicked thinking I wouldn't have enough so I made it all orange thinking I'd come back and make other colors later. I then ended up having a million years of orange frosting so I just added green to make the stems. But wasn't sure how to make it, so I decided to cut out pieces of bread and dip them in the frosting for the stem and leaves.

 

 

I then whipped up a runny mixture of regular icing to make the yellow eyes. Sigh. This is where it definitely crossed over the line to weird and not pretty looking. The bread as you can see was multi-grain and so the seeds show through it's eyes. And I was running out of time, so it looks kind of silly, and because it was so runny to my dismay it ran down the pumpkin's face, making it look like it had been crying yellow tears. And how in the world do all these chefs clean the plates so effortlessly. I had frosting everywhere and to try and get it off the plate was a disaster.

 

Here's the picture of mine next to Katie's. Phew. I don't think cake decorating is for me. I know it's all the big craze lately, but I find it very hard and frustrating - and frankly, I don't really like cake. So I may leave it to the really talented like my sister and call it good.

So enough about cake. Here are some more cute Jaren pictures being Super Man/Baby.

 

 

 

It was a fun Halloween weekend. This year I solicited trick-or-treaters from all the neighborhood kids who then for weeks would come up to chit chat with me every time I came outside or want to come visit me. They were cute. Every year I'll bring Halloween a little bit closer to becoming mainstream here. :) (cue Count Dracula laugh) Ha ha ha ha ha...... :) Happy Halloween!