I love this awesome ghost cupcake with innards of green buttercream frosting and a gumdrop for a brain that Jill Davis found at Wheatberry Bakery in Pasadena, California. The only way I could imagine it being cooler is if they had used a red or licorice gumdrop instead.
The New York Times looks into the candy lobby's role in extending daylight saving time by a month. The lobby believed that the extra hour of trick-or-treating in daylight would increase candy sales and decrease child deaths.
Instead of giving out Snickers bars and Hershey Kisses, why not pop edible candy scabs or poop-shaped chocolate into your trick-or-treaters' bags? Check out Wired's list of the creepiest, craziest Halloween candies for more ideas. Kids will eat anything!
Candyfreak
The New York Times has some good reading in the dining section today:
Candy corn, chocolate ice cubes, candy peanuts, and generic hard candies are patently unacceptable. To me they show a lack of respect for trick-or-treaters everywhere. Photograph from iStockphoto.com
For someone like me, who has a serious sweet tooth and likes to eat a lot, Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. I always loved trick-or-treating, and to me Halloween was always about the candy.
It certainly wasn't about the costumes. I was always the kid dressed up like, well, me. My mother was too busy to think about what costume I wanted or needed to wear on Halloween, so I'd go to Halloween parties dressed as Ed Levine. There was nothing fun, festive, or scary about that particular state of affairs.
For me the candy was king, and not just any candy, either. There were candies I desperately wanted in copious amounts, candies that were sort of OK—"sweet tooth–neutral" I used to call them—and then there were the candies I was desperate to avoid, that I regarded like the plague. I developed a candy hierarchy, along with an elaborate trading scheme in which I would try to pawn off the candies I couldn't stand to unsuspecting friends and neighbors in exchange for a candy bar. Those trades were built around an exchange of quantity for quality.
So consider my baker's (or should I say confectioner's) dozen halloween candy hierarchy.
Not Martha shows you how to make crawly spider cakes for Halloween using various kinds of Pocky, snack cakes, sugar eyes and chocolate sprinkles. Spiders will never again look as freakishly adorable or taste as sweet.
Learn how to make a bacon costume. All you need is foam, some big plastic bags, stick pins, spray paint in various baconesque colors, a hot-glue gun, Velcro fastener tape, and a burning love for bacon. [via Make]
The above video from About.com shows you how to carve a pumpkin in just three minutes!
...I mean, the video is three minutes long. It'll probably take you longer than that unless you have an electric saw. Whatever you do, don't hack it with a sword.
Carving a pumpkin is easy, results in a nice decoration, and is a good way to get our your aggressions if you want to stab something. Check out these links for pumpkin carving tips, stencils and inspiration:
And if you don't have access to a real pumpkin, there's always virtual pumpkin carving.
Lately I've noticed Halloween-themed cupcakes popping up at bakeries and grocery stores, but none of them look as cool or creepy as Nicole Weston's vampire cupcakes. They pulsate with the sugary goodness of cherry pie filling blood!
Suicide Food points out the unsettling side of Martha Stewart's baby Halloween costumes that turn your helpless bundle of joy into a roast turkey or lobster: "You are pretending for your baby, imagining she is food, meat, a dead and cooked animal." Perhaps slightly less gruesome: a salad or a pie.
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