New Style Halloween 👻 - pumpkin carving tips, indoor activities and more...
Halloween means fun, tricks, treats and sweets – and given the current restrictions on going out and about it’s lucky there’s so much fun to be had at home!
Time-poor and fun hungry?
There are lots of great Halloween tricks you can pull when it comes to delicious treats to eat! Decorating cookies is fun and super easy. Either bake your own (most delicious of all) or cheat and buy your favourite cookies and just Halloween-ify them for teatime!Â
All you need is:
- cookies (either bake your own or shop brought)
- some ready-made icing (ready-rolled is the laziest and quickest, otherwise a block is fine)
- black, green and red icing colouring.
- a small artist-type paintbrush
- some sheets of paper (great way to use the back of paper for recycling)
- a pen or pencil
- black, green and red icing colouring.
- a small artist-type paintbrush
- some sheets of paper (great way to use the back of paper for recycling)
- a pen or pencil
 1. Draw your fave spooky shapes on the paper making sure they are small enough to fit on the cookies – think spiders, webs, devil horns, devil tail, ghosts….then cut out the paper shapes.
2. Lay out your icing on a chopping board (if you’ve bought the block you’ll need to roll it out with some icing sugar first).Then lay the cutout shapes on the icing and cut around them with a blunt round-ended knife (the kind you eat with) ensuring children are supervised.Â
3.Once you have the shapes, pour a very small amount of your first colour into a saucer (a little goes a long way with food colouring) and paint your first shape. When you want to change colour for the next shape, wash the brush and dry with kitchen paper. Or if you're feeling really brave, why not dye the ready-made icing and cutout the features rather than painting them on!Â
4. Leave the colour to dry briefly, then use a small dab of honey or syrup to stick the shape on the biscuit. And enjoy!
 
Hunt the horror!
Start a new tradition – Halloween horror sweet hunt! Find the most intriguing and tricky hiding places for all your seasonal sweets and treats – you’ll be amazed how inventive you can be even inside the house (try inside the wellies and under saucepan lids, under the pillow and buried in the sock drawer… guaranteed you’ll be re-finding them all year!) and if you have outside space that will be useful too. You can even create your own special cool Halloween trick and treat collection backpack bag – all ready to be customised and decorated using the eatsleepdoodle wash-out pens it comes with, and perfect for gathering up all the sweets you find into.
Design your own Halloween backpack - doodle 'notebook' backpack, eatsleepdoodle £14.95
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 Pumpkin creativity – scary art
Carving the pumpkin is one of our favourite bits of the whole Halloween scene – there’s a job for everyone, whether you like designing, drawing, scooping out or cutting. We’ve gathered a gallery of inspiration for you – sometimes shaving sections to make your design is as stunning as cutting, and you can get different effects with more light coming through if you shave deeper. Whatever you do, children should not be allowed to use sharp implements and should be supervised with all pumpkin prep procedures!
 
Get creative with your designs - use a hammer and cookie cutter to make shapes, scrape the skin using a vegetable peeler, add pins and weave string or carve out some funky feline designs.
Halloween is our Marketing Manager Charlotte’s favourite festival and she’s brilliant at making everything look fantastic, so we asked her to give us her top tips and show us how to create your own cool pumpkin: here’s the outcome!
Happy Halloween to you all!
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