October 17, 2012

My 2011 Halloween Party… A Year Later ⁰

by Andrea • Personal • Tags: Halloween

Halloween is my favorite time of year.  I’ve always loved scary movies, anything paranormal related and getting dressed up.  Last year I decided to throw a little Halloween gathering for my girl friends… it was actually a themed game night.  I’m also a crazy competitor and love playing games, so I combined the two. I spent hours researching party ideas online and dedicated every evening for a week to party preparations, decorating and cooking, etc.  I was totally in my glory.  I took pictures of most of the goodies that I made, but this was prior to starting this blog so I wasn’t really thinking about sharing this info with the world.  So the pics aren’t the best, but I think you’ll get the idea.

First up… severed finger cookies!!  I found this idea in my Rachael Ray magazine.  The first batch of cookies that I made looked like huge blobs with no definition, so this took a little practice.  No one at the party wanted to eat them because they looked so gross!  It’s probably a good thing though because to be honest, the recipe was a little bland.  I recommend trying the techniques here with your favorite sugar cookie recipe.   Get the directions.

Graveyard Pudding… I can’t remember exactly what site I found this idea on, but if you look at the Google Images search results for graveyard pudding, you’ll see loads of fun ideas.  Basically this was just chocolate pudding with crumbled Oreos on top, and then I used Milano cookies as gravestones and wrote RIP on them with some store-bought frosting.

Eyeball Deviled Eggs… For this you just use your favorite deviled egg recipe and use food coloring to dye the yolks green, add half an olive for the pupil, and then draw on some red squiggles to make them look bloodshot.  I used mayo with red food coloring for this step.  I prepped the eggs a day in advance and by the day of the party, my squiggly lines were pink and not red anymore.  So I recommend doing that step shortly before serving.

Bloody Popcorn… My girlfriend actually had this idea.  She bought a kit to make candied applies at the grocery store and ended up melting the candy and drizzling it over popcorn and then added some gummy worms.  From what I remember this tasted delicious, but it was very sticky!

Witch’s Brew… My favorite part of the night.  I did a lot of research online for a Witch’s brew recipe and couldn’t quite find one that I liked so I combined ideas from several places to create my own brew.  I wish I had a big cauldron to put this in, but I had to use my punch bowl.  This was a combination of lemon/lime soda, rum, vodka, and lime sherbert.  Everyone raved about the witch’s brew… I made two batches and we drank every last drop!

I decorated the house in red and black. Red table cloths and I made use of my red candlesticks that I normally put out at Christmas. There were spiders and spiderwebs all over the house, and of course I had to build a fire and dim the lights to make it all complete! The pic below shows a bouquet of roses that I purchased in advance and purposely let die just for added ambiance, and I found the skull flowers at my local dollar store.

A little story about the night…  One of my best friends passed away a few years ago and Halloween was also her absolute favorite holiday.  During my planning I kept thinking about her and wishing she were there to celebrate with us.  I invited one of her other close friends to the party, and below is the pic of the two of us… I’m on the left, and Jen is on the right.  In the picture you can see an orb in the upper right hand corner above the stereo.  I didn’t notice this for a few days.

Jen and I stayed up late talking that night and around 2:30 in the morning we were talking about our friend who passed.  The music was on very low in the background and had been for most of the night.  Out of nowhere, the music suddenly went full blast and the dial on the volume was going up, up, up, up, up….!!  It was super loud and scared the crap out of both of us.  I jumped up immediately and ran over to the stereo and turned it back down and politely said, “Whoever did that, please don’t do it again!”  We were totally freaked out about this… but after seeing the pic with the orb over the stereo, I think our friend just wanted to let us know that she was there too.

As I finished writing the paragraph above just now, I felt a huge chill… my friend is joining me again as I share the story. 

And a bonus pic from 2009!  This is me as a vampire, my mom as a hippie, and some random guy dressed as Beetlejuice (isnt’ his costume awesome?).  Can you tell that I like dressing as a vampire… I have two different costumes that I alternate.

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