Now that I'm on uni break I've got more time for fun stuff. Yay! I couldn't pass up a chance to make Halloween cupcakes. Especially as Sarah and Duncan gave me a great book, Zombie Cupcakes, to use as inspiration. After seeing Not Quite Nigella's Haunted House cupcakes, I knew that I wanted to try them out too.

I think they turned out pretty well. The cake bit is gluten-free vanilla cupcakes. The tops are yellow coloured fondant decorated with black food colouring. The decorations were a Wilson team effort. Andrew is a much better artist than me so he drew the haunted houses using a food colouring pen. I then completed the pictures (by colouring in between the lines. I'm so clever!).

One mishap. The black food colouring didn't dry properly on the cupcake toppers so everyone who ate them ended up with black lips (oops!). Not sure what I need to do to make the colouring set.

Last weekend we celebrated Halloween with a pumpkin carving evening at Bek's house. Bek and her housemates had a great time carving pumpkins and turning them into scary jack-o'-lanterns. Bek's housemates went for traditional toothy grins. Bek tried her hand at a more difficult design. With Andrew's help, she was able to enlarge a stencil of a Jack Sparrow type pirate and translate it to a pumpkin. The end product was very impressive. (photos)

Halloween seems to be bigger over here than back home. Although, it is not as widely celebrated as it is in North America. On Halloween night we saw a few kids out trick'o'treating with parents chaperoning. Our door bell even rang once but we had to pretend we weren't home as we didn't have any chocolate to hand out.

Scary cupcakes were our contribution to the Halloween party. We made creepy, crawly spider cupcakes (body: raspberry, head: jaffa, legs: licquorice) and bloodshoot eye cupcakes (eyeball: marshmallow, pupil: MnM). We made the cupcakes using a chocolate cake packet mix (yes, we are lazy...). We followed the instructions to create the cake mix, poured the batter into cupcake patties and baked them for 20 minutes.

The worst part of making cupcakes is waiting for them to cool so you can ice and decorate them. The best part is licking the bowl/spoon/beaters clean of cake mix!

What are the ingredients for a successful Halloween party? On the weekend we combined spooky decorations, creepy costumes, Halloween themed food and pumpkin carving at Sue and J's Halloween dinner party. The Aussies kicked butt on this North American tradition. The party was definitely a success! The dry ice was the highlight of the party for the boys and the girls rated the pumpkin carving.

Well done Sue and J for hosting another successful event. Kudos to Sarah and Duncan for making it possible for the Aussies to try our hand at pumpkin carving. (photos)