Halloween cookies

Shaped cutters from Aldi.... Spookalicious!

Little ghost cakes

The ghost-shaped moulds are from Aldi, but they were selling out fast. Plain lemon pound cake recipe, topped with plain lemon icing and yellow icing eyes and mouths. Not my finest effort, but an OK start to Halloween Week...

Pumpkin time

For someone who is not a major pumpkin fan, I seem to be doing a lot with it lately. Tomorrow's project is two pumpkin pies, pumpkin scones, pumpkin jam and choc-chip cookies (not pumpkin-related, sorry. Although you could totally moosh some pumpkin into the dough, if you had to).
The scone recipe is Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen's: she of the famous prize-winning scones and the will of iron. I saw her once in Myer buying stockings, and even though she walked with a cane, she had that glint of steel in her eyes and you knew she just wasn't a woman to be messed with.
The scones were really delicious: soft, puffy, moist and decadent. When I turned them out to cut it was a bit of a trial as the dough was so floppy and soft, but it was worth it. Mmm.

Lady Flo's Pumpkin Scones

• 1 Tblsp butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• 1 cup mashed pumpkin (cold)
• 2 cups self raising flour

Beat together butter, sugar and salt with electric mixer or by hand. Add egg, then pumpkin and stir in the flour.Turn on to floured board and cut. Place in tray on top shelf of very hot oven 225-250c for 15-20 minutes.

Halloween 2007

So I guess the real question is: what am I going to do this year that could possibly top last year?

I am of course having my annual Halloween video night, where debauchery and madness may reign. Last year's food effort was OK, but I'd like to go a little more not-cooked, fresh and different this year.
We probably won't be carving this year, due to the pumpkin shortage that is apparently sweeping through town. Personally, I'm not convinced. There's still a giant vat of them down at the fruit barn. But whether we carve or not, I still need to do a big one for the front steps and to use the scoopings for my pumpkin pie.

Thinking about American-style ribs: the real ones, in homage to the Easter Feaster I did back in 2003. That was a gluttonous celebration of ribs and corn cobs. Haven't done a Feaster for Easter in quite a few years though. Perhaps I could bring back the tradition. Perhaps also some alcoholic fruit iceblocks? Tapas-style snacks? The new Donna Hay has a section on tapas....

And what will I WEAR to work on the 31st? Here's the plan: all black, with my new pumpkin brooch, bright yellow beads, neon orange heels and bronze makeup. Tragic yet awesome.

Sweet sweet pumpkin pie

"Eh Mahhh! Get me some pahhhh!!"

I made pumpkin pie from the scoopings from my carved army of the night. I used an amended recipe that I found on Recipezaar, although it didn't specify what kind of tart base to use. It just said "an un-baked pastry shell". Apparently in the States you can actually BUY raw pastry cases and so on in the supermarket. Decadence...you'll find none of that here...we actually have to MAKE our own cases from scratch! Although I could have bought frozen supermarket pastry and just laid it in the pie dish, it's not the SAME. I usually disapprove of pre-made, pre-bought, which might not necessarily be a good thing, and might change when I no longer have the time and inclination to make my own pastry from scratch. But I hope not.

So I used a shortcrust pastry recipe from The Silver Spoon. That damn book has saved me many a time. Whatever I'm not sure about, The Silver Spoon will know. There is a simple and lovely recipe on page 1008. (Transcribed with my specifications).

Shortcrust Pastry No.1 from The Silver Spoon

• 1.5 cups (200g) plain flour


• 1/2 a cup (100g) caster sugar


• 100g unsalted butter ( I always use Western Star), softened and cubed


• 2 yolks


• grated rind of 1 lemon


• pinch of salt
  

Sift the flour and sugar into a bowl. Make a hollow in the mound and add butter, yolks, rind and salt. Mix with fingers till a doughy lump. I had to add a squeeze of lemon juice because my mix wouldn't bind properly. Throw the lump in a plastic bag and stick it in the fridge for half an hour or so. When you're ready to go, lay a sheet of baking paper over a pie dish and either roll out the dough to fit or just press bits into the dish. Trim the edges.

My Pumpkin Pie

• 1 to 1 and 1/2 cups cooked pumpkin mash, water squeezed out in a teatowel
  
• 1 cup milk



• 2 eggs


• 1 cup caster sugar


• about a tablespoon of melted butter or margarine


• 1 big teaspoon each of ground cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger


• big pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 220 or 230 degrees celsius, mix all ingredients in a bowl and pour into pastry-filled pie dish as above. Mine took about an hour to cook until a knife in the centre came out clean, and I had to cover the pastry edges with foil after the first 2o minutes or so.

It's so delicious...vanilla and nutmeggy flavours combining in a rich, light-textured pumpkin pudding centre, surrounded by crisp tangy sweet pastry. It's not very good for me though, so I'll have to take most of it to work...or have a pie-eating party!

My carved army of the night

The carving party went really well. We ended up carving about 17 or 18 of the mini-pumpkins (thanks, David!), as we watched Friday the 13th, Chucky, Horrors of Spider Island and Saw.
I may have gone a little overboard with the photos, but they were just all so special and individual that I had to capture each one. Note especially the Elton John pumpkin of the star-shaped eyes and the two happy pumpkins side-by-side.



In the cold light of day, they look much less like my army of darkness and more like a pile of withered old gourds with scorch marks.

My first pumpkin carving effort for 2006

I thought I could call him Seamus. Seamus the Creepy Thin-Skinned Pumpkin.

Horror snacks

For my C-grade horror movie night, I need to provide snacks for my pumpkin carvers. I am thinking something quick, substantial, but not a giant super-meal, portable, snackable and tasty. The pita chips, blessed though they are, do take a good hour or two to make from start to finish. With that in mind, and with the contents of my pantry also in mind, I am considering the following:

Poppadoms
Marinated chicken legs
Fragrant rice pilaf
Cucumber and yoghurt salad
Possibly a quick chicken curry out of a jar, instead of the legs...but the legs would be more portable. Hmm.

So a vaguely Indian theme: tasty and with vegetarian options.

With the scooped-out pumpkin mush, I will make a pumpkin pie, I believe. I found an interweb recipe flavoured with cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla. Appropriate.

***update***


Success. The terrible terrible oven stuffed up my chicken legs (as expected), but they were salvageable. I coated them with a yoghurt tikka paste and roasted them. Also made the pilaf, poppadoms, cucumber salad with yoghurt on the side. I just set up a buffet on the table and let people drift past and graze at will. Nice and informal.

The pie will happen next weekend. Will have to think about how I'm going to make the shortcrust base: it might be fun to make it out of crushed biscuits. Gingersnaps? Shortbread? A combination?

Halloween and Day of the Dead

Like my pumpkins? These were three for a dollar at the Annerley Fruit Barn. Golden Nugget variety. I'll be carving one for my C-grade Horror Movie Night on the weekend, as we lounge around for an evening of Peter Lorre, Jason, Krueger and F.W. Murnau.

I just love Halloween, and not just because it comes the night before the Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos): a holiday that no one knows about here in Australia.

Day of the Dead is usually celebrated in South American countries, but also in the Phillipines and some Mexican-American communities in the U.S. It's about celebrating the life of ancestors, friends and family who've passed over (or begun their true life, as some believe), rather than being all morose about the fact that they're dead. People make effigies and icons of their dead loved ones, and it's a bright, colourful and joyful celebration with its own special foods and activities.
A few years ago, I had a go at making pan de muerto, or bread of the dead. It's a sweet, yeasty, eggy affair that I remember as being quite elaborate and involved. The recipe said to plait and cross the dough to make it look like bones. It was a complete failure, but I had a good time trying it. Soon enough, I'll try again. I'm just not very gifted at breadage.

The sugar skulls of Day of The Dead are another gorgeous reason to love this celebration. I've always said that I'd like my funeral to be a loud, sobbing, colourful New-Orleans style parade, with trumpets (very important), as seen in James Bond: Live and Let Die. Failing that, I'd also also accept a sugar effigy to be made of me, which would be placed on a shrine inside the house, surrounded with flowers, candles and photos of me, around which friends and family would gather before breaking the effigy into bits and eating it. That's probably not technically the correct procedure as practised for Day of the Dead celebrations, but I like the idea of blending voodoo, Catholic, Aztec and animist beliefs (just to irritate everyone from beyond the grave, and to give them something different to chat about afterwards).

Pumpkin scones are a good way to use up the scooped inside-pulp from your carved pumpkins. Once I decided to go all North American-style and make a real pumpkin pie, along with a pecan pie. The pumpkin pie was pretty good. Very sweet: probably too sweet for me. However it was as BITTER AS THE GRAVE compared to the pecan pie...I remember the recipe called for some obscene amount of light corn syrup, which I did find in Balaclava St, as well as molasses AND sugar. Honestly, none of use could stomach that pie. I ended up scraping off the sticky sugary pecans, rinsing and lightly salting them, then re-toasting as a less-sickly nut snack. Madness.

Halloween costumes: a few years ago (the night of the infamous Halloween Incident at Manly) I outdid myself in the costume department. I found some lady at Mt Gravatt selling her crappy old yellowed nylon-plastic wedding dress from the 80s, complete with plastic faded floral headpiece, veil (with cigarette burn holes!) and train, for 40 bucks. Gold. I splashed it with red paint and fake blood, powdered my face white, and went as a Murdered Bride. (We'll gloss over the fact that later, it ended up splashed with real blood as well. Halloween is a time for fake scariness...not real fear.)

Might try making some sugar skulls one day. I like how the name of the person they represent is painted on their foreheads: almost like a sweet voodoo embodiment of your loved ones.