Happy Hallowe’en Roundup

Happy Halloween!

So where’ve I been?  Well, two days after I wrote my last post, Jeff and I were standing in our living room and decided we needed to do “a bit” of fall cleaning. We’ll go through all the closets, we said. We’ll rearrange the furniture, we said. … A week and a half later, I found my computer again …

I was comparing last year’s Halloween craftiness to this year’s. In 2007 I made an October candy calendar, 3-D Halloween cookies, and Halloween costumes: a ladybug for me and candy corn for Audrey and Callie. I also crocheted a ghost-and-pumpkin set last year. This year I made the quilt for my Halloween swap. That’s a lot by itself, right? I’m still happy I did that quilt, because I finally proved to myself I could do something like that I have a habit of not believing I can do things.  So my Halloween craftiness has been limited this year, only because I was working mostly on non-Halloween craftiness on the side.

Gingerbread Pumpkin Cupcakes

I did make gingerbread as my 2008 Halloween treat. It’s my pumpkin-ey decorated take on a recipe from a Denmark cookbook - that is, Denmark, Iowa where my grandparents live. Many years one of the women’s circles of the town church (there’s just one church, the town only has 300 people) puts out a cookbook of recipes from cooks in the community. The first recipe book was put out in 1949 - my grandma still has an original, which is very “well loved” and held together with a rubber band, as you can imagine. I have a reprint of that cookbook put out a couple of years ago, and that’s where my gingerbread recipe comes from. It’s the recipe my grandmother recommends from the mother of one of her friends.  (The one issue with this cookbook is that it could really use a Table of Contents or an Index!)

As my special treat fer ya, here’s the recipe for Ginger Bread by Mrs. Arthur Meyer (it’s awesome).  I will note that if you make cupcakes out of this, it takes about 20 minutes to bake and makes 12.  Her recipe doesn’t say how long to bake things.

• 1 beaten egg
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 1/2 cup boiling water
• 1-1/4 cups flour
• 1 t. soda
• 1 t. ginger
• 1 t. cinnamon

Sift flour, soda and spice.  Mix in order given, beat thoroughly.  Batter is very thin.  Bake 350.  8 servings.

Halloween Costumes?  What are You Going To Be?

I am not technically making a costume for myself this year, however I am going to be someone. This is probably only funny to me, but I’m going to be Chris Knight from the movie Real Genius. Yes, I know I’m female and he’s not, but Chris is absolutely my favorite funny, irreverent character from my favorite movie (1984, yeah!), and in some senses, geekdom is really universal, isn’t it? I had such a huge crush on Val Kilmer for such a long time. I’ll be rocking his I love Toxic Waste t-shirt and sparkly head gear from his job interview (”Why are you wearing that toy on your head?” asks Dr. Dodd. “Because if I wear it anywhere else, it chafes,” replies Chris) and of course, bunny slippers (”May I take this opportunity to compliment you on your fashion sense, particularly your slippers”). If you’re familiar with the movie, you will find this outfit and these quotes hilarious. If you are not, you now think I’ve lost my mind.

As a side note, Callie has been with us a year. It seems like just yesterday we brought home a ball of fluff barely the size of my hand, and now she’s pretty fat, has a 6-foot vertical leap, is ridiculously fluffy and is sort of … I don’t know, I guess slightly on the side of demonic.

See what I mean? When did she learn to drink from a cup?