and let myself be sucked into the whole Halloween thing.
I couldn’t help it. I found this cute pumpkin plate when I was shopping today and thought how great it would be with little cupcakes on it. Sucker!!
I was majorly surprised to see how much Halloween stuff was sold out, and now they are selling costumes, wigs, deco’s, candy etc etc. Why is it so big this year?
I don’t think Yasu even knew it was Halloween either, because while we were eating dinner the doorbell rang, and he’s like, someone’s at the door… and I was like, no, it’s Halloween, it’ll be trick or treaters…and he just looked at me blankly like what the hell is a trick or treater… and no, we didn’t answer the door.
Anyway, I cooked dinner tonight, roast chicken with ORANGE coloured rice, and some potato salad. Yasu didn’t even blink an eye. He just exclaimed how yummy the rice looked but he didn’t ask why it was orange. I put orange lentils in the rice too, which gave it a bit of a different flavour, it came out very nice and fluffy.
I also made some cupcakes for dessert.
“Pumpkins” – Orange icing with M&M’s
“Ghosts” – Cream cheese icing
They were popular, Yasu had 3 in a matter of 5 minutes…and still wanted more! I used a plain cupcake recipe also mixed in some vanilla essence and custard powder, which gave it a really nice flavour and meant that they were soft and moist. It basically goes good with any topping.
Freshly baked cupcakes
Pumpkins & Ghosts
Bitten!
I used blue food colouring to give it a bit of colour, I just swirled it around in the mixture. :)
Happy Halloween!
7 Comments
Hallowe’en went viral this year. If you can believe it, it was even big in Japan this year – the shops have finally figured out how to market it, which is the key to everything here. I’m surprised that it has even infiltrated Australia – there can’t be any tradition of it there.
In Cananda, when I was a kid, it was a one-day event, you made your own costumes and at around 7 pm, you went around the neighbourhood (and nowhere else) with a pillow-case. The neighbours all pretended to be duly frightened, and gave us treats to make us go away and not haunt them. We would get bags of chips, some candies, and apples. Mum would take all the apples we got and make a pie the next day. A harmless night-out of dress-up for kids. It’s come a long way since then.
Like most traditions that that Japanese department stores adopt from elsewhere and flog to death, you’re heartily sick of it by the time the actual day arrives.
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I forgot to mention, with all my griping, that the food looks great. I can see why Yasu gobbled it down so quickly!
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Wow, I was interested to hear what you guys did it Canada, it’s quite a community affair isn’t it? I like it in that aspect, especially the apple pie part! ;)
I think the majority of people trick or treating here were teenagers about 16 years onwards, the little kids don’t really get into it, though I did see a few kids having fights in the shops with their mums because they wanted a plastic pitchfork and the mum’s didn’t want to pay $7 for something that will only be a one-day use thing.
Alot of the shops here have already put their xmas decorations up so it was quite funny to see them having halloween deco’s at the same time as xmas ones!
Thanks for your comments :)
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Very Impressed!All we/I did for Halloween was carve a pumpkin and have it displayed in the genkan.The end!
Love the foodie ideas you have;with the lentils,did you just add a handful to the “raw” rice and shove it all in the rice cooker? And the custard powder idea…brilliant!
Now I have to get my arse in gear and try these things out!
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Everything looks soooo yummo! Orange rice looks really, really good! And custard powder in the cupcakes … gotta try that! We did absolutely nothing for halloween this year. We put up some decorations on the windows and in the garden for Janae’s sake and even had a halloween barbecue last year, but this year…nada :(
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Hi Marianne, thanks for the compliments, and yes I just threw a handful of lentils in with the rice. I’m pretty sure you could do it with any small veggie like that, peas etc, or small chopped veggies even, because it essentially steams them.
I’ve never seen anyone carve a pumpkin here, so that is an interesting experience for me! It must take talent to get it right in one go though? :)
@ Misome – thanks for your compliments, they really were very simple and could be adapted for any event. I’m going to post the recipe later :)
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Greatings, Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post.
Have a nice day
BernieR
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