I'm going to start with the obvious, we go all out for all of the holidays... oh and I'm pretty sure that there's something wrong with me. I am pretty much just a big kid. I enjoy being over the top, and watching the looks on my kid's faces. I sound like a broken record, but I really want to give them a special childhood, filled with amazing memories. That lofty goal comes with the price of not much sleep for me on the night before special occasions, but in the long run I think it's worth it.
The kids woke up to see above table. We made a run for the border (Watertown New York) a week or so ago, mainly to buy Halloween cereal. We can't get Count Chocula, BooBerry, or Franken Berry cereal here in Canada. The kid's got a huge kick out of their bleeding bowl and scary cereal this morning.
We stayed up until 12:30 last night putting the finishing touches on everything for today. 12:30 a.m.is actually pretty early for us on the eve of special occasions. I had to make two cakes (two instead of three because Elly's class can only have snacks that are prepackaged and say "peanut free"). The kid's get a real ego boost when they bring in special cakes to share with their class. Some years the class has actually given them a standing ovation. Not only did I have two decorated cakes to make but I decided (here is the there's something wrong with me part) to make them extra special lunches too.
I have Wilton letter presses that are intended to be used for cakes. You press them into your cake, and it gives you neat letters to follow with your fine cake tip. I accidently found them in my cake decorating drawer and had a great idea. I cut my cheese into small cubes and then pressed the letters into the cheese to spell out "BOO". I gave myself a pat on the back for that one. The above lunch is Elly's. One of the children in her class has a severe allergy to peanuts and there is one (or possibly the same kid) has a severe egg allergy. This means that I cannot send boiled eggs for Elly's lunches, and she loves boiled eggs. The big kids all got eyeball deviled eggs, but I gave Elly strawberry yogurt with Halloween sprinkles in it's place.
For Grace I changed up her sandwich. She's 11, and the small ghost sandwich (which I cut using a cookie cutter) just would not cut it. To give her a maximum sandwich and still make it festive, I just cut the top out of it using my pumpkin cookie cutter. I gave her smoked turkey and cheese, putting the orange cheese on top. I found candy googly eyes made by Wilton and attached them with a tiny bit of butter.
I was pretty stoked about the deviled eggs. If the kids don't come home tonight and ooh and awww about them, I might ground them all. They were time consuming, but soooooo worth it. I used food gel and a wooden skewer to make the outside of the "eyes" look blood shot. This was time consuming, very time consuming, but gave a really cool effect, if I do say so myself. I then made my yolk filling (mashed egg yolk with mayonnaise), but I added some blue food colouring gel to it. The last and maybe most important step was to add a sliced black olive for the pupil. I made Christopher stop what he was doing to come over and look at my art pieces, I mean deviled eggs. I kept congratulating myself on a job well done, at one point Christopher just rolled his eyes and walked away (to be fair to him I had really been congratulating myself on making mother of the year for a while).
So at 12:30 a.m. my feet hurt, my hands could barely close by my own free will, and I smelled like icing. I had made a skeleton cake, a creepy pumpkin cake (which I forgot to photograph), deviled eggs that looked like eyeballs, Halloween themed lunches, and had decorated the breakfast table. I walked like a zombie upstairs to shower (although maybe some men find the smell of icing to be an aphrodisiac, I don't know, some people have weird tastes). I can tell you that my bed felt pretty darned good last night. It was one of those rare nights that I do not wonder what I could have done better in the day. I felt pretty pleased with myself. The kid's would have a great morning, and I felt like a good Mom.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!!!
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