Holiday Gift Ideas & Traditions Blog

A delicous recipe for the ghouls and goblins that will be trick or treating at your house this Halloween.

• 1 box ready made cake mix any flavor
• 2 tubs ready made white frosting
• 3 tablespoon tinted with green food coloring
• Remainder tinted with orange food coloring.
• Candy for eyes, nose, and mouth

Preheat oven according to the directions on the cake mix box. Grease two medium oven safe bowls. Place one cupcake liner in a mini cupcake pan. Prepare the cake batter into the single mini cupcake liner. Pour the remaining batter evenly into each of the oven safe bowls. Bake according to directions making sure not to over bake the mini cupcakes. Let cool. Level off the rounded tops of cakes so they are flat. Place one of the cupcakes round side down, onto a serving plate. Spread a bit of orange frosting on the surface of this cake; and place the other cake on top so that it creates a ball. Frost the entire ball with orange icing. Frost the cupcake with green frosting. Decorate.

Halloween has become the second most popular yard decoration season of the year (behind the Christmas holiday). So make your house the scariest or most inviting house in the neighborhood this holiday season with these fun yard decoration tips. The kids will love stopping by your fun or scary home on Halloween night for some tricks, treats or little Halloween gifts. So go all out no matter what theme you choose!

Fake tombstones. Turn your front yard or flower bed into an eerie graveyard with tombstones. If you don’t have a flower bed, it is a good idea to mound up a pile of dirt in the yard if you have enough room. You can either ‘buy’ fake tombstones constructed from wood or vinyl online or at a local party supply shop or if you are creative, make your own. Just buy some plywood or styrofoam, cut it in the shape of classic or fancy cross tombstones, add a stake to the bottom (so they can be pushed in the ground) and paint them with gray paint. You can add scary names like Rob DeGrave or Miss N. Cranium using black paint or make up some funny epitaphs for each tombstone.

Half-buried monsters. When you want to give the kids a bit of a scare, put some half-buried monsters along the edge of the driveway or walkway. You can buy creatures like skeletons or Frankenstein at party shops. Usually they come as a set with a head (that can sometimes be lit with batteries), 2 hands and 2 feet. Each body part has a stake to hold it in the ground so just put them in place and then use some of those fallen tree leaves to cover around the edges of the body parts. This will hide the stakes and create a scary feel as though the monsters are rising from the ground.

Fog machine. Adding fog can create the eerie and scary feeling that goes right along with Halloween. Just buy one of these machines online, but remember you’ll need access to electricity wherever you are planning to create a layer of fog. Most machines come with the glycol ‘fog fluid’. What a great addition to your front porch or graveyard.

Motion activated decorations. Decorations such as ghosts, witches and monsters can be innocently sitting or hanging around your porch and yard, but an electronic eye or sound activated technology make them come ‘alive’ as people approach or talk. Many of these decorations will light up, shake or even shriek when activated. What a great way to give the neighborhood kids a little scare!

Lighting. When you just want to dress up your house for Halloween without all the scary antics, you can use some festive Halloween lights to give your house a beautiful glow. From strings of pumpkins or skeletons to orange rope lighting, the possibilities for Halloween lighting are endless. You can also buy ‘can’ lights at your local Home Improvement store to uplight hanging ghosts, fake cobwebs or spiders that you have strategically placed on your porch.

When you throw the big Halloween costume bash this year, make the food as fun as the party with these ideas. Your friends will think you are oh so ingenious.

- Scary Halloween Molds. Many party supply stores carry molds such as brains and hands that can be used to enhance the scary theme of the party.  For instance, you can fill the hand molds with red punch, freeze them and float them in the punch bowl to keep the punch cold at the party. It is better to have the actual party punch not be red so that the bloody looking hands are noticeable. Another common shape is a brain mold. Put a few drops of red food coloring in the bottom of the mold to create red veins and then put in flesh colored Jello like Peach. Let it set up in the refrigerator and flip it onto a serving plate for an eerie, shaky party brain. At adult parties, you could make the brain like Jello shooters where you add vodka or rum to the Jello instead of water when mixing it up.

- Apple cheese ball. Since October is apple season, an apple-shaped cheese ball would be a nice addition to any Halloween party. Buy some shredded mild or sharp cheddar and mix in just enough flavored or plain cream cheese to allow you to form a ball shape. Form the cheese into an apple shape that is slightly larger on top and smaller on the bottom, wrap it in plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator for at least a few hours to firm up.  Just before the party starts, roll the ball of cheese in red paprika so that it is completely covered. To make the apple look a bit more realistic, stick in a cinnamon stick to form the stem and a few bay leaves on the top of the cheese ball. Place it in the middle of a serving platter and surround it with gourmet crackers for a great appetizer at your big Halloween bash.

- Spider web cupcakes.  When you are looking for a quick, easy and festive dessert, these cupcakes are the answer. Buy a chocolate, apple spice or pumpkin cake mix and make 24 cupcakes using Halloween themed cupcake liners (you can buy these at the grocery store too). Frost the cupcakes with a tub of fluffy white or cream cheese frosting. Then, either use a tube of black decorating gel or a tub of white frosting that you color with black food coloring to make the webs on top of the cupcakes. If you make your own black icing, put it in a plastic sealable storage bag, cut off a tiny angled corner of the bag bottom, and squeeze the frosting out to decorate. Basically, you put a dot of black icing in the center of the cupcake and then draw concentric circles around it. Then, take a toothpick and drag it from the center of the cupcake to the edge (like you are cutting a piece of pie). If you do this 6 or 8 times around the cupcake, you will form what looks like spider webs. You can optionally add a plastic black spider to the top of each cupcake.  

Your imagination is the only limit on creating fun and scary Halloween party food. Just poke around online for some other great Halloween recipes and you’ll be all set to throw the best Halloween party your friends have ever attended. And if you are going to a party, remember to bring the host and hostess a little Halloween thank you gift for inviting you to their party.

Adult Halloween parties are a great way to entertain your neighbors and friends. Create fun and festive party invitations and recommend that everyone attending the party dress up for the Halloween costume contest. Make the night memorable by have special Halloween themed foods and decorating your house and yard for the big party. An added benefit is that the Halloween trick or treaters can enjoy the outdoor decorations too. Here are some great decorating ideas that will create a festive atmosphere.

- Fake cobwebs. Fine-threaded fake cobwebs offer a great way to add some inexpensive ambience to your Halloween celebration. You can purchase bags of these loosely bound cotton filament style webs at party supply stores or online. Tape or tack one end of the cotton web down while you pull the rest of the cotton out to form a thin web. The thinner you can get the webs without breaking, the more realistic they look. Add them to corners for basement Halloween parties and on the porch or around doors to welcome guests as they enter your home. Add some black plastic spiders to make them scary and use ‘can’ lights to uplight the webbing to make it more noticeable. - Reusable Jack-O-Lanterns. Spend a little extra money and time this year to achieve gorgeous, realistic looking jack-o-lanterns that can be used for years to come. Many craft stores now sell hollow pumpkins that are made from lightweight foam. Just buy a few of these pumpkins as well as a pumpkin carving kit to create the best looking jack-o-lanterns on the block. Follow the carving kit instructions to construct intricate Halloween designs. Remember that because these re-usable pumpkins are foam, do not burn candles inside them because they are flammable. Instead opt for lighting them with glow sticks or small battery powered flashlights.- Bloody handprints. Available online or in party supply stores, these re-usable red plastic decorations are meant to be used on windows and mirrors to make it look like spattered blood.  Designs range from bloody looking handprints and footprints to red blood drops and splotches. Create a dramatic ‘bloody’ massacre to welcome guests to your scary Halloween party.

Kids love dressing up for Halloween so why not give them another opportunity to show off this year’s costume by hosting a Halloween party for their friends or neighborhood kids. All those little ghosts and goblins will have a blast getting together to play games such as bobbing for apples, eat some festive Halloween party food and receive a fun little Halloween party favor gift to take home with them. Here are some ideas for party food that will tie in perfectly with the Halloween theme.

- Cut-out cookies. Kids love cookies so what better way to make the party festive than with various Halloween shaped cookies. From witches to pumpkins to black cats, cookie cutters are available at local craft and party shops. To make it easy, just buy a few rolls of refrigerated sugar cookie dough and use the Halloween shaped cutters to bake up some festive cookies. Decorate them with colored icing if you are creative or just use simple orange and black sugar sprinkles to make an easy dessert the kids will love. Another great alternative is to buy a Halloween cookie bouquet to use as a party centerpiece and as the dessert. The one from Holiday Gifts & Gift Baskets features ghosts, pumpkins and black cats surrounding a center cookie that says Happy Halloween.

- Monster mouths. Here is a quick and easy snack that the kids will love to eat at the party. Buy some red apples, peanut butter and miniature marshmallows to create these appetizer treats. Core and slice each red apple into 6 to 8 long segments to create the monster mouth. Toss the segments in a plastic storage bag with some lemon juice or Sprite to keep the apples from turning brown. Then ‘frost’ each segment with peanut butter and place 3 or 4 mini marshmallows in the peanut butter to create the gums and teeth of these monster mouths. These little treats are super cute and healthy too.

- Pumpkin cheese ball. The kids will devour this festive cheese ball and parents will be in awe of your ingenuity. Buy a couple packs of shredded cheddar cheese and a block of cream cheese. Mix just enough cream cheese in with the cheddar cheese to make it stick together and allow you to shape it into a ball that is 4 to 5″ in diameter. After it is a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it for a few hours so it sets up. Then use the back of a regular kitchen knife to create the pumpkin ribs (vertical lines around the pumpkin). Top it off with a 1″ tall piece of broccoli stalk to create the pumpkin stalk at the top. Keep it refrigerated until party time when you set it out on a plate surrounded by crackers.

- Broom cookies. Bake up a batch of peanut butter cookies either from scratch or from refrigerated cookie dough. Prior to baking, use a fork to press down on each cookie to create the vertical lines of the broom bristles. Stick a pretzel rod into the cookies to make the broom handle. Then just bake the cookies for the recommended amount of time.

- Graveyard cake. This fun and festive dessert is easy to make and looks great in the center of the food table at Halloween parties. Just buy and bake your favorite flavor of cake in a 9″ x 13″ cake pan. You can either leave the cake in the pan or dump it out onto a rectangular tray if you are going to use it as a centerpiece. Frost the cake with a thin layer of chocolate frosting. Take a 15 oz bag of crushed chocolate Oreo cookies and sprinkle it atop the cake so it looks like dirt. To make the gravestones, dip some peanut butter Nutter Butter cookies in white or gray colored chocolate and write on the top half of the cookie with black gel frosting (things like R.I.P.). After the chocolate has hardened, stick them in the ‘dirt’ to make a graveyard. Then add some gummy worms, plastic skeletons and spiders to make it even scarier.

- Halloween candy bouquet favors. Give each child a little something to take home and enjoy after the party. Just buy some simple Halloween mugs or cups somewhere like Wal-mart or Oriental Trading Company. To create the bouquet, fill each mug with small pieces of Halloween candy such as lollipops, candy corn, etc. Wrap the mug in cellophane and add black and orange curling ribbon for a darling favor that both the kids and parents will love.

According to the US Census Department, over 36 million American children (ages 5 to 13) will trick or treat door to door on Halloween night.

Many people in the United States carve pumpkins to light up on Halloween.  Chances are that you will be getting a pumpkin grown in Illinois unless you purchase one grown at a local farmer because Illinois leads in US pumpkin production by a huge margin. Consumers will use up over 1 billion pounds of pumpkin as jack o’ lanterns, in pies or other ways just this year alone.

The nearly 2500 costume stores and rental shops across the US make dressing up for Halloween easy in fun. Kids and adults alike frequent these Halloween gift and costume shops to make this holiday one of the most popular in the United States.