Halloween Birthday Party – Glow in the dark food, devil eggs, monster slime, cereal pumpkins

We’ll cut right to the chase here:
How to make glow in the dark food


Tonic water! I have to give all the credit of this one to Our Best Bites. I’d never seen this before and loved the idea from the moment I saw it
I didn’t get any great photos out of my fun, but after hunting down a black light finally, it really transformed the entire room. Everything glowed. Especially in this small picture, you can’t see it very well, but not only did all the food I used tonic water in glow like crazy, but so did the card envelopes, part of the table cloth (white ghosts), lace runners, etc. There’s a difference in the light colors at the top because I had a single real “black light” with all the appropriate rays, and the others were colored black just to keep things spooky, hehe.

I took Our Best Bites’ recommendation and added some tonic water to my jello skulls. My photos have magically disappeared of these, but they had this kind of glow and in the shape of skulls:

(From OBB obviously)


~Edit~ Here’s one where you can see the skulls on the plate, but they’re upside down and not glowy. It’s not a good shot, but I realized I’m missing dozens of photos at this point, so this is the best I can produce right now. :( On the right hand side, you can sorta see the orange pumpkin jello through the blur, and the middle guy was what I had left of the white jello, so he became a ghost blob in the middle.

It only takes a little bit of tonic water to make them glow like crazy so I only had to replace about half of the water in the jello with tonic water. I also placed small margarita-style glasses around the table with a bit of tonic water in them for added effect.

Devil Eggs



No, not deviled eggs. They are, of course, but the point is that the eggs look like devils themselves, hehe. I posted about this once before, so it was nice to get to do it myself.

These were the hardest thing I had to deal with all day. If you look closely, you can see that the eggs aren’t exactly the smoothest, to say the least. They would not peel properly *at all* and I spent 45 minutes picking away shell carefully. Worst.Eggs.Ever. It was awful really and put me behind schedule because I had no idea I’d spend that long, just trying to get shell off. I’ve never had those kinds of issues before, even with eggs that gave me a bit of a struggle. Bleck.

(You can see the wacky tablecloth and bones, etc here too)

I varied the pepper shapes and where they were pointing, too. Oh, and to make them round instead of oval, just squish the eggs some before slicing. You can hold each one between your finger tips for several seconds, but I was under major time constraints, so I set them under a box lid that I filled with heavy books, hehe.

Monster Slime Eyeball Punch

This was made up as I went. I couldn’t find any advice on how to make eyeballs for a punch that didn’t just say “buy the candies” and all other sorts of eyeballs either couldn’t go in liquid without falling apart or wouldn’t have floated anyway.

So I combined a few ideas, added my own, and took a leap, hoping it’d work. Sure enough, it did!

The night before, I carefully stuffed 3 ice cube trays full of marshmallows, lifesaver candies, and raisins, to look like eyes.

I tried doing some where the pupil portion was facing down as well, but it didn’t make any difference in how they floated. Then I filled them carefully with water and froze them. This made it so I had ice to keep the slime cold, and it kept the candy marshmallow eyeballs connected (until they melted, of course). It also guaranteed they’d float.

The rest of the punch was just lime sherbert pulled apart slightly into swampy chunks, Sprite, and some tonic water to add a slight bit of glowiness.
Kix Pumpkins

I got the original idea from The Girl Who Ate Everything, but changed a few things around.

Here’s the original recipe:
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
3 1/2 cups Reese’s Puffs cereal

The key difference I made was using Kix cereal instead. It’s still round, but doesn’t seem as “bad” to me. I used some regular corn syrup and sugar, but cut down the amounts a bit and added a little extra peanut butter instead. I also ended up using white candy coating bark instead of chips, too, because my store was out of white chocolate chips. The rest of the instructions you can find on TGWAE site.

Cake


And this one isn’t a “how-to” but definitely an important part of the party….the cake! Haunted house cake, at that, thanks to my mom’s decorating skills.

And in case you can’t see the trim around the bottom, she  turned some of those into ghosts at the last minute as a final touch:

Comments

1. 

   Leave a Reply

   Anonymous
   November 2, 2010

   When eggs have a hard time peeling it is a sign they are fresh. You can test eggs for freshness before you cook them by putting salt in water. If the eggs float they are not fresh.

2. 

   Leave a Reply

   Quirky Jessi
   November 3, 2010

   The eggs I used had already been sitting in the fridge for a week, so I really didn’t expect freshness to give me issues. :(