It's Halloween Time!

A while ago I saw these cookies on Pinterest and thought they would be fun to make this year. Here's the recipe if you want to try them yourself.  Made with a cake mix and cream cheese, the texture is a little different than your normal chocolate chip cookie, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

It's a fairly straight forward recipe - mix the dough, chill it (much longer than the suggested 30 minutes), bake and plop in the eyes. I wonder if they make these candy eyeballs in different sizes, or if my cookie dough balls were too big, because the eyes seemed out of proportion. I tried doing more than one eye on a few of them, but wasn't satisfied with that either. Although they didn't turn out quite like the original, it was a delicious experiment.

Here's the next pin I thought I'd try this year:

You can't go wrong with Reese's peanut butter cups, right?

Since they've invented these cute little mini ones, I thought I'd save myself the trouble of unwrapping candies and go that route. I figured the ratio of pretzel to candy would look more like a real broom as well.

Unfortunately, they were too small, and sticking in the pretzel caused them to collapse. So, I went back to the store and got the regular sized ones.

I probably could have just persevered with the mini ones, because the larger ones also had "collapsing" problems. I had the greatest success with the ones that you could tell had thin bottoms.

I think they turned out okay, and even the rejects were delicious!

However, I didn't avoid the mess of wrappers that needed cleaning up at the end.

Simple and Sweet - with just the right amount of salt!

Here are a couple of things I'm going to try tomorrow when we get ready for the trick-or-treaters. We'll see if they turn out successfully!

Cut strips out of a black garbage bag and hang across the entry.

Stick a glow-stick in a balloon and drape cheese cloth over before hanging.

I came across this wreath made out of ping pong balls and googly eyes and it gave me the idea to try creating some sort of scripture mastery game out of googly-eye ping pong balls. However, ping pong (or table tennis) balls are more expensive than I imagined, and while looking for them I saw these orange practice golf balls. They look just like pumpkins, don't they? So I bought them instead.

At home I printed off some "leaves" with our scripture mastery key words, threaded the curling ribbon through a couple of holes in the ball, and tied them on. Tomorrow in seminary we'll have a little relay - go get a pumpkin from the pumpkin patch, bring it back to your team, look up the scripture, and when everyone's found it, go get another pumpkin. Hopefully the activity turns out well! At least the little "pumpkins" are cute.

We discovered that Trunk-or-Treat isn't quite as fun when your own kids aren't around to share it with them, but we still had a good time. It's always fun seeing the creative costumes, and the chili was yummy, too.

I actually wore a costume this year - a non-politically correct Indian dress left over from Cub Scout Day Camp days - but didn't think about taking a picture of myself. I did get one of Wayne, wearing his traditional "googly eyes" and scaring unsuspecting minions.

Enjoy your holiday traditions and celebrations!

Happy Halloween!

The ideas worked!