It’s A Lifestyle

I guess it’s safe to say that my family and I are a little on the “creepy” side. Halloween is our favorite holiday.

While I’m on the subject, I don’t want to hear about it if you don’t think Halloween is a legitimate holiday. It has its own designated day, decor, and traditions. It’s a HOLIDAY. Fight me.

A few years ago, I had to listen to some old man, a customer at work, go on a tirade about how Halloween isn’t actually a holiday. As he blathered on, I had a very vivid fantasy of getting in my car and driving three states over to decorate his front yard with “that pagan bullshit”.

You might remember that the next time you are being a dick to someone in a call center who has all your personal information in front of them.

I know where you live. Literally.

But I digress…

I guess you could say that, as a family, we have a unhealthy fascination with all things horror or macabre. The Husband Dude loves all the old time Universal Pictures monster movies, to the point he had them all tattooed into a sleeve on his left arm. I’m obsessed with true crime stories and shows. THD and Shane are obsessed with face painting and frequently experiment with different bizarre looks.

I’m obsessed with skulls, to the point that my home and even my desk at work are decorated all year long with skulls. I frequently wear clothing, jewelry and handbags that are adorned with skulls.

The first chilly day we had here last week, I pulled out my skull scarf and wore it to work. A coworker told me I looked like I was all set for Halloween.

Right. Halloween.

You can imagine that October is a big month in my household. So much so, that because THD’s birthday also falls in October, we have a long tradition of combining Halloween elements with his birthday celebration.

THD’s favorite thing to do on or around his birthday is to have a monster movie marathon. This marathon consists of the three “classics”, the original Universal Pictures films: The Wolfman, Frankenstein, and Dracula (in that order, I might add). After watching those, he usually chooses a few others to watch. Sometimes it’ll be the sequels to the aforementioned classics. Sometimes it’s just any B movies that are as crappy as they are old. Ed Wood films are some of his favorities.

If you’ve never watched an Ed Wood film, you need to grab some popcorn and enjoy the craptacularness. Ed Wood was an actor and director in the 1950’s who was famously portrayed in the 1994 movie starring Johnny Depp. He was known for only shooting scenes in one take, no matter how bad they were, and for using some of the worst props, effects, and actors ever.

He also had a love of wearing women’s clothing and could often be found directing his films while wearing his girlfriend’s angora sweater.

Anyway…in addition to watching really old and really craptastic movies, THD likes to pig out on junk food and snacks. Over the years, I’ve tried to get more creative by pulling the Halloween theme into our food.

This year, I got so into planning the food that I completely forgot about the birthday cake.

I know. How do you forget the birthday cake for a birthday?

Well, I managed it.

I didn’t realize my error until it was far too late to order a custom cake, which is what I usually do. I’m a great cook, but I’m a terrible baker. My baked goods don’t ever turn out right. I’m sure if I practiced more, I’d get better at it, but I don’t have the time or patience for that, so here we are.

I called about ten different places to see if they had any pre-made Halloween themed cakes, but hardly anybody did, and the couple that did had happy little jack-o-lanterns or other cute little kid type decorations on them. That just wasn’t going to work.

I bit the bullet and bought the ingredients to bake and decorate a cake, wondering how on earth I was going to pull this off without ruining THD’s birthday cake tradition, but I was partially saved at the last minute. I was in the grocery store, picking up some last minute ingredients for the food when I breezed by the bakery to see what kind of cakes they had. There was a plain, white cake with white frosting that had a simple orange border piped around it. They had thrown some sprinkles on it to make it “birthday-ish”.

I decided that would be my base and I could decorate from there. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about whether the cake itself was going to turn out well. Now it was just a matter of my decorating skills, which as you can see from this photo, are not top notch but at least it wasn’t a total loss.

I started with a bed of crushed Oreos. I used the limited edition Halloween ones because they had orange creme filling and I thought that would look kind of cool in the crushed up cookie bits. Crushing the Oreos was easy. I broke a bunch of them in half and threw them in the food processor, then pulsed until I had mostly crumbs and few larger chunks.

This bed of Oreos would be my “dirt” and the larger bits worked out well because they looked like clumps of dirt or even rocks. Perfect.

I bought most of the decor at Walmart. That’s how much I love The Husband Dude. I went to Walmart on a Saturday afternoon. I better get a good Christmas present!

The decor consisted of tombstones that I was able to write on with edible ink markers. Who even knew there was such a thing as edible ink? Probably everybody but me.

After the tombstones, I scattered bloody bone candies all over then I used the edible ink to draw faces on marshmallow ghosts and stuck them into the cake with toothpicks. The final touch were candy eyeballs around the edges of the cake.

Look, it wasn’t professional by any stretch of the imagination, but it was better than just a plain ol’ birthday cake.

The other new thing I tried were these skull pizza pockets. Again, I was worried because dough and I don’t mix, but I managed to pull this one off too.

I ordered this cute cakelet pan from my best friend, Amazon. I pulled the recipe from Pinterest, which is where I find most of my creative “ideas” these days. Assembly of the skulls was actually pretty easy.

I greased the pan with butter, which is what the instructions for the pan recommended. The instruction on Pinterest said to use cooking spray, but I’ve seen how badly that can ruin a nonstick pan, so I decided to go with the pan’s instructions.

After greasing each skull, I rolled out some ready-made pizza dough. Again, with the dough. Maybe someday when I grow up, I’ll make my own pizza dough, but for now, I let Pillsbury do the work.

I cut the dough into four pieces, then laid each piece into a skull mold. I pressed the dough into the crevices of the mold so that the skull features would be sure to show. I ended up using one and a half tubes of pizza dough in order to fill six molds.

Next came the filling. In each mold, I put a small mound of Mozarella cheese, a tablespoon (more or less) of pizza sauce, pepperoni (I used mini-size, but you can use regular or Italian sausage would be really good too!) and another mound of Mozarella. Then, I folded the rest of the dough over and sealed the ends.

I followed the direction on the pizza dough and baked these skulls for about eighteen minutes on 400 degrees (F). I would start watching them about fifteen minutes in because mine were verging on being overdone.

At first, I was a little upset that some of the pizza sauce had oozed out until I realized that was actually PERFECT for a Halloween skull! It looked like brain popping out!

My Facebook friends were actually the most intrigued with the easiest snack I made: Mummy Dogs.

These are about what you think they are. I used some Ekrich Cheddar Brats, but you can do this with regular hot dogs, breakfast sausage or any other hot-dog shaped meat. I took some crescent dough (again with the dough! DOH!) and used a pizza cutter to make thin strips that I wrapped around the dogs to make them look like mummies. I believe I baked these for about fifteen minutes at 350 (F) but just keep an eye on them so they don’t burn. After they came out of the oven, I added the eyes, which are just candy eyes you can buy in the cake decorating aisle.

We always pull the eyes off before eating because candy and piggies in a blanket don’t mix well!

The rest is pretty self explanatory. We had chips and dips. I made a veggie tray in which I used an orange bell pepper to look like a pumpkin, then I used the edible ink to draw a face on it. He’s supposed to look like he’s throwing up the dip, but that didn’t work too well. Next time, I’ll start sooner and find an actual pumpkin I can carve to look this way!

By next year, we should be in our new house and will have a little more space for decorating. I can’t wait to buy more skulls and candelabras and oddities for Halloween.

Yeah. Right. For Halloween.