Last Saturday, we were invited to a pumpkin carving party with the Lee family! There were lots of Halloween-themed treats and games for the little kids, and our whole family had a great time taking part in the festivities with friends. Stephanie and Chwan were wonderful hosts and really threw an awesome Halloween party full of fun for all ages!
Happy Halloween! The Halloween fun continued into this week, even though we’d already had a good share of activities over the weekend. While Dan had carved his pumpkin at the Halloween party on Saturday, Mio and I decided to paint our pumpkins at home this week. She’s still a little too young to be wielding a knife, so we thought painting would be a much safer alternative. 😉
Earlier this week on Tuesday, there was a little Halloween event at Mio’s preschool! Parents were invited to come by earlier than the usual pickup time, so we could sit down in the classroom as the kids sang to us. It was our first time really getting to observe our kids in the classroom setting, so I was really looking forward to it!
While Mio was quietly sitting in the circle with all the other kids in the class when I entered, as soon as she noticed me sitting at the table, she sprang up and clung to me, refusing to sit back down in the circle and sing with the other children… much to my dismay because I wanted to see her participating like all the other kids. Oh well… she’s the youngest one in the class (they let her into the class this year even though her birthday was just past the cut-off date), so I guess she’s still comparatively a bit of a baby and has some separation anxiety issues. After the kids finished singing their songs, they were invited to change into their costumes for their mini Halloween parade outside.
The 2.5 year old class is the youngest class, so that day they walked out into the parking lot, showing off their costumes to the older classes that were seated across from them. The older classes then sang songs to the little ones — it was really cute!
Happy Halloween, everyone! Hope it is eventful and full of fun. 🙂
For the Halloween party on Saturday, I made some Rocky Road cupcakes decorated to look like pumpkins! While the cupcake base ended up being a bit of a flop (somehow, the cake came out to be oddly dense), the frosted decorating turned out decent and was a lot of fun, so I wanted to share it here! We looked around at different baking blogs and sort of took techniques and tips from a bunch of them to decorate these:
For the frosting, I chose to color some cream cheese frosting orange… because I LOVE cream cheese frosting! But buttercream and most other light-colored frostings can be used and colored, too.
To achieve the sparkly rough texture, you then roll the frosted cupcake in some orange sugar. You can buy the colored sugar, or color regular granulated sugar yourself with food coloring, as we did.
Taking a toothpick or chopstick, press the edge against the top of the cupcake and repeat a few times around the cupcake to get the ridged look of the pumpkin. Then use some green colored frosting (we used the same cream cheese frosting and had set aside some before we colored it orange, and colored the remaining portion green) to pipe on vines, stems, and leaves. (Another baking blog showed how you could use green string licorice to create the vines, which I thought was really neat, but we had no idea where to get green string licorice and didn’t really have the time to go look for it, either. Cool idea, though!)
A video of the piping… (Please excuse my text message alert and Mio’s sigh towards the end. haha*)
I loved this decorating idea, and hope that it can be an inspiration to others, too! I think it’s a great idea for not only Halloween, but for Thanksgiving and throughout the fall season. Trust me — if I can do it, you can do it! I’d like to thank my sous chef Dan as usual… it’s awesome having a hubby that doesn’t mind being an assistant to all my baking endeavors!
Halloween is still a couple weeks away, but we dressed Mio up in a pumpkin outfit when we visited Dan’s parents on Sunday. Dan’s mom just happened to have an adult size pumpkin costume that she had handmade years ago, and so we took some photos of them together as matching Jack-o-Lanterns! The cuteness is overwhelming:
Some pictures of Mio solo…
Trying on the hat from Grandma’s costume….
Dan’s mom let me try on the costume too, so I could get a couple Mommy-and-Me pictures as matching pumpkins, too! Grandma looks much cuter in it, but here are a couple of Mio and I together, for memory’s sake. 🙂
Look at that belly!
We always have fun at the grandparents’ house! Mio is so lucky to have Grandpa and Grandma nearby…
We have so many pictures from this weekend that I need to catch up on uploading and posting. Stay tuned for more! 😀