Perk #1

* Let your creativity loose on a pumpkin.  Get out a knife and get carving.  It doesn’t matter what face you choose, the act of carving a pumpkin stimulates the creative right side of your brain, which is responsible for feelings of playfulness.

Need inspiration for carving ideas?

Go to ThePumpkinFarm.com

Perk #2

Dressing up for Halloween is not just for the kids.  You can release tension by wearing a costume yourself.  Dressing up for Halloween  has been proven to help adults de-stress by letting them reveal other sides of themselves that are normally stifled.  What a great way to be a superhero or a vampire, for a day, without worrying about looking silly.

Perk #3

You can rekindle romance with a horror flick.  Watching scary movies with your loved one revs up the relationship even more than watching a romantic movie.  Getting scared together pumps up the adrenaline and triggers the same brain chemicals that are released when you first fall in love, thus renewing your passion.

I love Halloween. Today for you Coffee Break readers, I  have two fun Halloween recipe ideas using refrigerated crescent roll dough  and refrigerated breadstick dough.  Couldn’t be simpler. And oh so cute!  Impress your family with these simple and fun ideas.

If you missed last week’s recipe for  Creepy Eyeball Treats, check them out.

Witches Hats

Ingredients:

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. Separate dough.  Shape each piece into a long triangle.Place 1 salami stick piece along base of each dough triangle.  Partially roll up dough to cover salami and create brim of hat.
3. Place 4 pepperoni halves on top part of each hat.
4. Place on ungreased nonstick baking sheet and bake for 12 minutes or until golden brown at edges.
5. Warm sauce in microwave.  Serve witches hats with warm sauce for dipping.

Breadstick Broomsticks

Ingredients:

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375°F. Unroll dough and divide along perforations. For each broomstick, shape breadstick into 8X1-1/2-inch strip; twist one end for handle. Cut 5 or 6 slits (2 inches long) into opposite end; separate dough at slits for straw.
2. Place about 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets and bake 15 to 18 minutes or until golden brown.

Be sure to check out these other Liz and Kate Halloween ideas:

• Halloween Month: Creepy Eyeball Treats & Monster Mash
• Halloween Month: Disgusting Deviled Egg Eyeballs & Toads in a Blanket
• Disgusting Worm Salad
• How to make Disneyland Gourmet Caramel Apples

~Kate

Enjoy your Coffee Break!

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

Do you know who we owe this great (often misquoted…does bubble, bubble toil and trouble ring a bell?) Halloween diddy to??? It’s none other than Mr. William Shakespeare.

I love the month of October…the crisp air and crunchy fall leaves…the pumpkin patches and corn mazes…the apple scented candles and Fall break at school.

But most of all, I love dressing up for Halloween, and most years you’ll find me in some variation of a witch costume. I think my witch thing started just after I was married, when I dressed up as a witch out of desperation because we were struggling newlyweds and the only costume-y thing I owned was a witch’s hat. I won a witch cackling contest that year and the rest, as they say, is history.

Luckily, I live in a place that seems to embrace my witchy side. This past weekend an estimated 10,000 witches gathered for Witches Night Out at Gardner Village in West Jordan, Utah, for two nights of spell binding fun. Did you catch that number? Ten thousand ladies willing, dare I say even excited, to dress up as witches and go out proudly into the public and parade around cackling with wicked glee.

I was one of those witches. So were 4 of my 5 daughters. I have trained them well, have I not? (The 5th one was not able to come along because of a silly thing called higher education.)

Check out those pink fur boots.

This is what I want to be when I grow up…

So get your inner witch on this Halloween…I dare you!

And I’ll leave you with this -

Act IV, Scene 1 from Macbeth (1606) by William Shakespeare

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

.

Three Scottish witches are going about their business—tossing poisoned entrails, eye of newt, toe of frog, and such, into a cauldron—while awaiting a visit from the man they said would be king: Macbeth. “Double, double toil and trouble” is part of the refrain to their demonic incantation… The collective memory has clouded somewhat; often, this refrain comes to mind in the jumbled form “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.” The witches are actually trying, with their spells, to pile up toil and trouble until they “double”—yielding twice the toil and double the trouble for Macbeth, presumably. enotes.com

~Kate

Enjoy your Coffee Break and Happy Halloween!

• Halloween Month: Creepy Eyeball Treats & Monster Mash
• Halloween Month: Witches Hats & Breadstick Broomsticks
• Halloween Month: Disgusting Deviled Egg Eyeballs & Toads in a Blanket
• Disgusting Worm Salad
• How to make Disneyland Gourmet Caramel Apples

One of my favorite Halloween traditions is roasting the pumpkin seeds after my family carves their pumpkins. It’s a delicious and healthy treat that everyone will love.

How to Roast Pumpkin Seeds

1. After you remove the seeds from the pumpkin ( the ooey-gooey best part of carving pumpkins, in my opinion) rinse pumpkin seeds under cold water and pick out the pulp and strings. Do this right away before the pulp dries.
2. Place the pumpkin seeds in a single layer on a baking sheet, stirring to  sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.
3. Sprinkle with salt (garlic salt and seasoned salt are also delicious options) and bake at 325 degrees F until toasted, about 25 minutes.  Stir seeds about half way through cooking time.
4. Let cool and store in an air-tight container.

Nevertheless, I’ve come across quite a few spookily-themed foods of late. This one, in my humble opinion, is pretty jolly gross. And I figure, why should I have all the fun?

Mind you, this meal is someone else’s brainchild. It appears on AllRecipes, courtesy of Angela O. Maybe you could serve it just before heading out to trick… or treat. So without further ado, I bring you Bloody Baked Rats.

Ingredients:

• 2 pounds ground beef
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 cup dry bread crumbs
• 1 (1.25 ounce) packet meatloaf seasoning mix
• 1 cup cubed Cheddar cheese
• 3 (10 ounce) cans tomato sauce
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1 ounce uncooked spaghetti, broken into fourths
• 1/2 carrot, cut into 1/8-inch thick slices
• 1 tablespoon frozen green peas

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. In a large bowl, combine the ground beef, onion, egg, bread crumbs, and meatloaf seasoning. Use your hands to mix until well blended. Measure out 1/3 cupfuls of the meat mixture and mold around a cube of cheese like a meatball. Shape into a point at one end and lengthen the body a bit by rolling between your hands. Place your ”rat” into a shallow baking dish, and continue with the remaining meat. Insert pieces of uncooked spaghetti into the rounded end of the rats to make tails.
3. In a medium bowl, stir together the tomato sauce, sugar and Worcestershire sauce. Pour over the rats in the dish and cover the dish with a lid or aluminum foil.
4. Bake for 45 minutes in the preheated oven. Uncover the dish and continue to bake for another 20 to 30 minutes, basting occasionally with the sauce to glaze the rats.
5. While the rats finish baking, heat the peas and carrots in a small bowl in the microwave for about 15 seconds.
6. Carefully transfer the rats to a serving platter so that their delicate tails don’t fall off. Press peas into the pointy end to make eyes, and insert carrot slices to make ears. Spoon some of the tomato sauce around them and serve.

-Liz

Check out Kate’s ideas for beating Halloween hunger here.

Recipe and photo for Bloody Baked Rats courtesy of AllRecipes.com

• Halloween Express recently caught a shoplifter. The punishment? The thief had to stand outside the store in a Bert (from Sesame Street) costume, holding a sign that read: I got caught shoplifting… Now. Does anyone else see the ineffectiveness of this? Or is it just me?

• Nothing rhymes with orange. Really. I’m not kidding.

• Everyone’s seen orange pumpkins – and probably green and white ones. But did you know there are actually blue pumpkins, too?

• The US spends an average of $2 billion on Halloween candy each year. Another $1.5 billion is spent on costumes, while $2.5 billion is spent on Halloween paraphernalia.

• Eighty-six billion Americans decorate their homes.

• Upwards of 93 percent of kids under 12 go trick-or-treating (that breaks down to roughly 36 million goblins). Ninety percent of adults admit to sneaking a piece or two of candy from their kids’  bags. I say that estimate is about 10 percent too low (Not that I would ever do that…)

• A rather unique program, launched this year by National Childrens Oral Health Foundation  is asking Americans to put a different spin on trick-or-treating, by collecting money for the tooth fairy: Trick or Treat for America’s Toothfairy(true story).

• If you’re in for a good joke, check out this list of Halloween howlers. On that note, I’ll  leave you with my favorite: Do zombies eat popcorn with their fingers? No, they eat the fingers separately. Muah-hahahaha.

Tell us how you’ll be celebrating this year! Just leave us a comment below!

-Liz

Disgusting Deviled Egg Eyeballs

Ingredients:

• 6 hard-boiled eggs
• 1/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1 teaspoon mustard
• Pinch of salt
• Green and red food coloring
• Sliced black olives
• Toothpicks

Directions:

Peel the cooled hard boiled eggs and slice them in half lengthwise. Scoop out the yolks and mash in a bowl. Mix in the mayonnaise, mustard, and salt. Stir in a few drops of green food coloring.

Spoon the mixture into the center of the egg halves. Place a slice of olive on top of each half. Dip a toothpick into red food coloring and then use it to draw lines on the eggs to give a bloodshot look.

Don’t they look disgustingly delicious?

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Toads in a Blanket

Ingredients:

• baby dill pickles
• cream cheese
• sliced salami
• toothpicks

Directions:

Cut the pickles into fourths lengthwise, so the pickles are slightly larger than the salami slices.  Spread a thin layer of cream cheese on a slice of salami, wrap around a pickle slice and secure with a toothpick.

Be sure to check out these other Liz and Kate Halloween Ideas:

• Halloween Month: Creepy Eyeball Treats & Monster Mash
• Halloween Month: Witches Hats & Breadstick Broomsticks
• Disgusting Worm Salad
• How to make Disneyland Gourmet Caramel Apples

*Enter a comment at the bottom of this or any other post, and be automatically entered in this week’s giveaway!

Disgusting Worm Salad

by Whitney Hancock

These edible worms are a BIG hit for our Halloween Dinner. The first time I served these up the kids really freaked out. My daughter couldn’t even look at them at first, but after some coaxing and a little good natured teasing, she ate one. Then much too her surprise, she liked them.

Just so you know, this isn’t a Liz Original. I think I ran across the idea at some point last year, when Coffee Break brought you the Craftdown to Christmas. And for whatever reason, it came to mind as a perfectly simple yet snazzy idea to try. Frankly, I’m pretty pleased. I think you will be, too!

So here’s how you make this centerpiece:

What you’ll need:

• A pumpkin or gourd
• Fresh or artificial fall flowers
• About 15 minutes

How to do it:

• Cut the top off the pumpkin, as if you were making a jack-0-lantern, being sure to scoop out all the guts. Set seeds aside, if desired.
• If you have time, allow the pumpkin to dry out for a couple of hours. If not, no big deal.
• Arrange fresh or artificial flowers in pumpkin. Don’t forget to add water and maybe a little flower food if using fresh flowers!
• Voila!

See how easy that was? So easy that you could wash off the pumpkin seeds, roast ‘em and snack on ‘em while sitting back and admiring your new centerpiece. Kate gives you step by step directions here!

-Liz

Don’t forget to pre-order your copy of In the Kitchen with Liz and Kate: Practically Painless Recipes!

In order to delve into this one, I took the original recipe and began by simplifying the cupcakes themselves. As you will see, they aren’t part of the ingredients photo, because I trust that you people know how to purchase a cake mix and make a couple dozen cupcakes.

Anyway, in my opinion, the how-to’s of this project are all about what’s on top of the cupcake. So let’s start there with the nitty gritty.

What you’ll need:

• A couple dozen cupcakes, cooled (note: you may or may not have the stamina to make skeletons for all 24. Just sayin…)
• Small tub of white icing
• One package large marshmallows
• One package small marshmallows or white chocolate bark – yes, I realize they aren’t in the ingredients photo either. I’ll explain in a minute
• 24 sucker sticks (available at craft stores)
• Gel icing – Black
• White chocolate-covered pretzels

How to proceed:

Ice cupcakes as usual and set aside. This is probably a good time to take a deep breath. I put Hannah in charge of making the skeleton faces. At first, we tried gently smashing the large marshmallows to make them scarier. Not sure that worked, so we ditched that idea. Hannah grabbed the gel icing and made two eyes, drew a line for the mouth (funny – all her skeletons seem to be smiling. Weird.). Anyway, there was a hole in the top of the icing tube (how does that happen?), so all of a sudden, she had what resembled a big slimy black leach on her finger. (This project was quickly starting fitting in with Halloween.)

She ran into another problem, too. The icing wasn’t coming out in smooth thin lines. It was globbing up and smearing together. So she ended up getting a toothpick, putting the icing on the tip and drawing on the faces that way. I also happened to notice that she seriously needs to paint her fingernails. But I digress. At that point, I think she was on marshmallow head No. 2.

Meanwhile, I was assembling the white chocolate-covered pretzels for the rib cage. Except that the holes in the pretzels were about seven times the size of the sucker stick (not an issue brought to light by the original recipe).

Panic-stricken, I rummaged through the cabinets to find some way to fill in the gaps. This is where the mini-marshmallows or white chocolate bark come into play. I had both on hand, but for reasons of expediency, I decided to try the mini-marshmallows first. I mushed together two mini’s, and squashed them into the middle pretzel hole, then carefully inserted the sucker stick. Things got pretty messy at that point. By the time I had three pretzels on the first stick, the method got a tad easier. So that’s how we got the ribs to stay on the stick. And it almost gave the look of a spinal column, too. In retrospect, I probably would’ve melted the white chocolate and used it like glue to adhere the pretzels to the sticks. But why live in the past?

Anyway, at this point, Colton was running in and out every few minutes. While he didn’t volunteer to help, he  did offer to eat the first one, then went to his cousin’s to play.

Meanwhile, with rib cages attached to the sticks, and several marshmallow heads ready to go, we began the full-body assembly. Some had enough room between the head and first pretzel that we could grab the stick and insert it into the cupcake. But for the most part, we had to grab them from the top and squish the little marshmallow heads in on the sides in order to get the stick in the cupcake.

Once the sticks were inserted, some of them tended to fall to the side, so we had to finagle them in (which seemed to work). Many of the rib cages fell, too. So they may not be the prettiest skeleton cupcakes known to man. But all in all, it was a fun way to spend a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon a week before Halloween.

If you give this one a try (and why not?) let me know if you found other ways to attach the ribs or decorate the faces!

-Liz