27 Oct 2024
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, has her own suggestions for trick or treat giveaways…
The supermarket aisles are lined once again with plastic tubs containing either individually wrapped chocolates or lollipops and chewy sweets, and this necessarily means it’s Halloween.
Over the years, I’ve learnt that there’s an optimum timeframe for buying the trick-or-treat stash ready for the local children to rummage through on the 31st. I can’t leave it too late or the choice of what to buy is massively limited, but equally if I shop too early, I’m very likely to have eaten the entire supply myself and need to buy it all over again.
This year, we’ve been a little creative in our household. My eight-year-old and I have baked various spooky treats, some with relative success and others… well, see the photo of the loosely termed ‘ghost cookies’ for a frightening Halloween fail.
There are a few items that I’ve found useful to add to my baking arsenal at this time of year. Edible googly eyes can rescue just about any odd-shaped cookie plonked on the baking sheet by imprecise small hands, turning them into monsters or ghouls with next to no effort.
Squeezy tubes of icing are also very useful for drawing spindly spider legs or bat wings, or even better – decorating pens, which are basically felt tips whose ink won’t poison you and are great for more intricate designs like the blood vessels on eyeballs or Frankenstein scars.
A rainbow of food colouring is also helpful. Gels are more effective than liquids,
though more expensive, too. Make up some simple icing in a bowl using water and icing sugar, then divide it into several smaller bowls or ramekins and add a few drops of different gel colouring to each one. Kids have a great time experimenting with mixing different shades, but be warned that murky brown is the inevitable outcome of a lack of restraint.
A variety of bright colours looks really effective spread over cookies or fairy cakes and makes a great backdrop to a set of fangs or a witch’s hat.
My daughter drizzled squares of chocolate tray-bake with green, purple and orange icings, under strict instructions to use only one colour per square (spot the moment of disobedience in the form of purple ‘hair’ in the photo), and then let loose with a riot of decorative goodies and those ever-useful googly eyes.
Indeed, a hearty supply of orange and green gummies or Smartie-type confection is very useful for Halloween-ifying even the most banal of bakes and easily applied in any pattern imaginable.
It doesn’t have to be all sugar and chemicals, though. It’s so easy to just throw sugar at Halloween and then peel your kids off the ceiling at the end of the evening.
But there are some fun and healthy Halloween hacks out there.
I’ve been known to use outright bribery along the lines of: yes, you can have a lurid green, sprinkle-encrusted brownie if you also eat a pumpkin satsuma, which results in a frenzied wolfing down of the latter followed by the protracted gorging on the former. The only saving grace is how little of the brownie actually gets eaten, with so much of it ending up around the kids’ mouths instead.
Banana ghosts are another easy win and look very effective after being peeled, halved and skewered (which sounds unnervingly like hanged, drawn and quartered, doesn’t it?), then adorned with a little pair of eyes and a gaping mouth as though uttering a ghostly moan. Or perhaps they’re lamenting the indignity of being impaled on a wooden stick – whooooo knows?
