Our Halloween fun day!

We started the day out early on Wednesday, because I knew it would be a filled day. In the morning we decided we would make some chocolate covered candied apples. It was fun, but a little hard to do since there is a lot of hot caramel, and chocolate, and little ones. Definitely not a hands on treat to make with little ones, except for putting on the sprinkles or toffee bits due to the danger of getting burned little hands. The caramel candies took a while to melt as well, leaving the kids waiting around to get started. It was funny, Justin said,...."Mama, why don't you just put them in the microwave to melt them?", and I had told them that they would burn black, because they would get too hot- or so I thought I had read. But after waiting 20 minutes or more and the caramel pieces hadn't even softened one bit on a double boiler, I opted for the microwave after all. In about 3 broken up minutes filled with stirring, it was ready! The caramel set up fast, and then we were ready for the milk chocolate bath, and a sprinkle of toffee bits and/ or sprinkles with the kids. I got some Ghirardelli chocolate in white, hoping to dye it orange to put on the apples, but it seized up when I added the color. Unfortunately it took 2 bags before I had realized what had happened. Luckily I had a third bag. I went "old school", and threw the white chocolate chips in a Ziploc bag and threw it in the microwave for under a minute and smashed it around, and when melted, snipped off a small little bit at the corner of the bag, and squeezed some onto the apples. I ditched the idea of having orange colored chocolate on the apples, and went with the white. Finally....success! We all split 2 apples for our dinner dessert, and they were really good. Really sweet, but good!






We then carved a pumpkin. We got out our designs in the little booklet that came with the carving tools, and the kids picked 2. One for one side of the pumpkin, and one for the other side of the pumpkin. Even Hunter got into it for a quick minute. Again, that was hard for him to take part in the cutting. But he liked the cleaning out of the seeds. The boys had fun, and in the end, both designs came out great!

Next we make cookies. Not from scratch, though the kitchen was a disaster, and if you had walked through it, you might of thought I had used every dish, spoon, cup, and plate in the house. But, at Walmart there was 2 bags left of their instant cookie mix in a bag that only needed 1 egg and butter. So I mixed up the 2 batches, rolled it out, and let the kids cut out the cookies. After they were baked, it was about 6pm, and I was exhausted. I put the leftover chocolate from the apples onto each cookie, and quite frankly threw the leftover sprinkles and toffee bits onto the cookies. I had planned on having the kids take part, but at that point, I was done, the kids were done, and we hadn't even eaten dinner- not to mention....there was nowhere to eat as I had taken over every inch of the kitchen counters and table! So after a quick clean up with the kids help, we pondered dinner as I lay stretched out on the recliner, dusting off the flour from my shirt. After about a 20 minute discussion...and talk of spaghetti and meatballs (of which I told Justin he must be on a different planet if he thought I was making that), and delivery of pizza (which would take another hour), we settled on frozen meal dinners. Ahhhh the back-up dinner. Thank God it was in the freezer for such an occasion! We ate, and for dessert, we had our candied apples. It was really good! When it was done, I read some books to Hunter, said goodnight to everyone, and went to bed! We all had a lot of fun, and can't wait for Halloween to come!