Saturday, October 10, 2009

Halloween Cookies

Its three weeks until Halloween (and ten weeks five days until Christmas - just sayin).   Miss 3.5 - the lesser of the two screamies - was born on 31 December. As anyone with a birthday around then will know, trying to organise parties is a bit of a nightmare at that time of year, so I have moved Miss 3.5's birthday party to 31 October.  Two reasons for this (and yes a list because I LIKE them)...
  1. 31 October (or thereabouts) is the ancient Celtic New Year's Eve - ancient being pre-Roman - and is where Halloween originated.  Miss 3.5's birthday is modern New Year's Eve, and I liked the synchronicity.
  2. Its well before the pre-Christmas insanity of late November/Early October
This afternoon we had a trial run of the Halloween biscuits we'll be making for the party.  Mostly because I couldn't wait to play with our new biscuit cutters.

All went as smoothly as any cooking project does when assisted by a 5 year old and a 3.5 year old, until we came to ice the cookies. After clearing up a small misunderstanding regarding ice the frozen stuff and icing the stuff you put on cakes - I poured my icing onto the cooled biscuits as per the cook book instructions.


Ruh-roh - as Scooby Doo used to say.

Through trial and error I discovered I needed a lot more water in the mix and it had to be hot enough to really hurt when I poured it onto my hand by accident.  Oh, and I added some food colouring.



Hmm, think I'll be having another stab at it before the big day.

I also discovered that putting tasteless orange food colouring (and by that I mean the food colouring has no discernible taste and not that it is not stylish, I mean orange is the very definition of style is it not?) into vanilla flavoured biscuits magically makes them taste of orange.

Miraculous.

4 people love me:

Suzanne Brandyn Author said...

lol They look unreal...Gee you will have to come and do some cooking at my place, Cait. lol...
It's not that far away.

suz :)

Anonymous said...

Hi, nice bright orange. There is another tasteless orange food colouring without the flavour, texture or smell of 'carrots'. It is really potent, and healthy! The only problem is that it is in powder form, but it is pure antioxidant. You can get it from www.coloursoflife.com.au, but I think it is more for people who want healthy alternatives to the food colourings.

Unknown said...

Thanks Suz :)

Unknown said...

Thanks Anon, its a fantastic idea to use natural colourings instead of the horrible fake colours. I'll have a look at that website.

Cait