Tag Archives: Halloween

GUEST POST: Halloween Cookie Project For Kids

This month’s guest post comes from Kimberly Chapman, a competitive cake decorator who teaches beginner/kid friendly classes in the US and UK.  She is a multiple prize winner at various international shows, including first-place awards. She’s known for her dynamic and detailed figure work, as well as pushing the boundaries of standard techniques to the point that the Austin show created an Innovator Award, of which she was the first and only multiple winner.  She blogs her edible media experiments at Eat the Evidence. in between other crafts, authoring feminist romance novels, community volunteering, and being a mom to a preschooler and a preteen.  She had to tell her preschooler to “Stop that!” three times during the writing of this bio and expects to be fetching the first aid kit any minute now. We’re very excited to have such an accomplished kitchen whiz share her skills with us at Raise A Mother. For more fun ideas, check out her site!

Hi, I’m Kimberly from Eat the Evidence,and I specialize in coming up with wacky cake and cookie projects for kids and decorating beginners. One of my most popular tutorials is how to make your own fake, edible, chocolate-flavoured blood for Halloween treats, so for a collaboration with Raise A Mother, I’m very excited to my bring my 3D filled cookie techniques to a whole new audience.

On Eat the Evidence, I often use a special pan covered with semi-spheres to make dome-shaped cookies that can be filled with candy, the fake blood, or other fillings.  But I know not everyone has access to or interest in buying such a device.  So for this article, I’m going to show you how to use basic kitchen tools to still be able to create filled cookies, explaining everything at a beginner-friendly level with lots of options so you can create with confidence.

Let’s make some filled 3D tombstone cookies!
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Happy (Stressless) Halloween, Mamas!

Hope everyone is having a happy Halloween today, but mostly, hoping that your evening with your kiddos is a fun, relaxing time. I hope you spend the day enjoying the love your kids have of dressing up and playing pretend, the excitement they feel at the prospect of showing off their costumes to friends and neighbours, and indulging with them in some yummy treats without worrying too much about their sugar intake levels. If it takes longer than you anticipated to get them into their costumes, so what? If you don’t get to all the houses you planned to trick-or-treating, no big deal. If your kids are up later than you had hoped, well… It’s Daylight Savings tomorrow anyway, so hopefully that’ll just get them some extra snoozing in the morning!

Lastly, about costumes: it doesn’t matter whether you made, bought, borrowed, or scrounged for your kid’s (or your own!). There’s a lot of pressure out there in the online world to feel a little sheepish about how much effort and skill we mothers do or do not put into our kids’ costumes. But as I’m paraphrasing from a colleague who reassured me about Arlos’ birthday party last year: “They don’t give prizes for kids’ Halloween costumes.” (Well, maybe some people do, but not ‘they’ in the sense of the world at large.) Whatever you have the time/inclination for is just fine. And what you have the time/inclination for may well change from year to year. Last year, this was my family:

With John as C3PO

With John as C3PO

Arlo and I as an Ewok and Endor-Moon-Leia

Arlo and I as an Ewok and Endor-Moon-Leia

There was weeks of planning involved – the transformation of a crash-test-dummies suit into a C3PO costume, the gathering of sticks and buttons for the decorations on Arlo’s Ewok headdress, and trips to various fabric, thrift, and costume stores for bits and pieces we’d need.

This year, John and I aren’t dressing up, and Arlo is wearing a one-piece, fuzzy Winnie-the-Pooh suit my mom’s had in her basement pantry since 1999 when my brother wore it. I haven’t put one bit of thought or effort into this Halloween. And you know what? Arlo’s going to have just as much fun as he did last year, and so am I.

So I hope you enjoy this Halloween holiday – because it’s certainly a time for being silly, but not for being stressed about silly things.