Halloween Food and Ideas

[tod2]

I love watching cooking programs on TV and one of my favourites is The Kitchen.
Their latest Halloween food ideas were really good.

SCARY MUSHROOM SKULLS
Ingredients
24 white mushrooms with stems, 12 large and 12 medium
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
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Directions
Watch how to make this recipe.
Special equipment: a small melon baller
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Using a melon baller, scoop out 2 cavities in each mushroom cap for the skull's eye sockets. Use a paring knife to cut a triangle for the nose area and to cut away lines in the stem for teeth. Place each mushroom upside-down (cap-side down) on the prepared baking sheet.
Bake 15 minutes for the medium mushrooms and 20 minutes for the large. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate. Allow to sit and come to room temperature (the mushrooms will expel a lot of water at this point; use the paper towel to absorb the moisture).
Heat the balsamic vinegar in a small pot over medium-high heat until reduced by half. Cool to room temperature and drizzle over top of the mushroom skulls before serving.
Recipe courtesy of The Kitchen

tinyurl.com/js47nhp

Read more at: www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/mushroom-skulls.html#lightbox-recipe-video?oc=linkback

Cocktails: Eyeball Martini's
Make your favourite martini cocktail. Take a can of litchis and drain. Make a small slit/hole in the one side and insert a blueberry or small black grape. It should now look like an eyeball.
Drop two in each glass that has vampire fanged teeth draped on the rim. These can be bought at the sweet store and are usually a hard jelly.

[Don Cuevas]

Witches' Brew.

[rikita]

i made these things:

(very simple chocolate cookies - dough of powdered sugar, butter, flour, vanilla sugar and cocoa powder, the eyes are made of a bit of white dough and small chocolate chips)


(round rice cooked in carrot juice and vegetable broth, later grated cheese added, the face is made out of olives, though i was less patient so mine weren't as neat as these)


(cut up olives, stuck to the eggs with cream cheese, again a lot less neat due to impatience)


(mainly decoration, not so practical for eating, except for the legs ...)

[tod2]

Those are fabulous Rikita - I love the spider eggs! The carrot rice balls seem a lot of hard work.
On The Kitchen they showed us how to make spider chocolates by sticking curved pretzel sticks into the sides of a round chocolate. Mine were not a great success but I managed a few that looked OK. Your egg ones look much better.

[rikita]

oh, the photos are from the internet, my photos of my own attempts are still inside the camera and they don't look quite as nice ... but it was fun (though i needed more time than planned to prepare it all, so friday was really busy, because i also decorated the room - and of course in the end the kids were mainly interested in the sweets) ...