Cookies, Pumpkins, Halloween Galore!!!

So one of my friends 20th birthdays was last weekend and her favorite cupcakes are red velvet so I decided to take a stab at making some from scratch. I love making and decorating cupcakes but I've never tried red velvet so it was a fun little adventure for me. I found a Paula Deen recipe online and they turned out soooo yummy!!! I was slightly impressed with myself! And I think my favorite part was the ghost shaped tins I found at Target, they were a quick and easy way to make the cupcakes that much cuter without having to take the time to do some intricate decorating.

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
• 1 cup buttermilk, room temperature
• 2 large eggs, room temperature
• 2 tablespoons red food coloring
• 1 teaspoon white distilled vinegar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the Cream Cheese Frosting:

• 1 pound cream cheese, softened
• 2 sticks butter, softened
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
• Chopped pecans and fresh raspberries or strawberries, for garnish

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 (12-cup) muffin pans with cupcake papers.

In a medium mixing bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder. In a large bowl gently beat together the oil, buttermilk, eggs, food coloring, vinegar, and vanilla with a handheld electric mixer. Add the sifted dry ingredients to the wet and mix until smooth and thoroughly combined.

Divide the batter evenly among the cupcake tins about 2/3 filled. Bake in oven for about 20 to 22 minutes, turning the pans once, half way through. Test the cupcakes with a toothpick for doneness. Remove from oven and cool completely before frosting.

For the Cream Cheese Frosting:

In a large mixing bowl, beat the cream cheese, butter and vanilla together until smooth. Add the sugar and on low speed, beat until incorporated. Increase the speed to high and mix until very light and fluffy.

These are the finished products:

The white frosting was perfect for the ghosts.

This weekend was so much fun, we had a lot going on! First Friday night Heather and I went to the lady's night out for our church, Harvest Community. It was nice we went to Paradise Bakery and had dinner with some of the lady's and we got to talk and get to know some new people.

Then my friends and I went to Fry's and bought some pumpkins and we went back to my house and carved them. It was so nice having all of my friends together for some fun pumpkin carving. It has been a long time since all of us have gotten together like this.

While we were all carving pumpkins Jessy took our scraps and carved some different words.

Here are all of

us and our finished pumpkins. I thought they all turned out pretty darn good. I was kind of sad I didn't put much detail in mine but I was looking forward to making my pumpkin W-E-L-C-O-M-E sign.

We carved the pumpkins on my back patio on our newspaper covered table. The newspaper made for a very easy clean up, all we had to do was fold up all the lovely pumpkin guts in the newspaper and toss it all in the trash. It worked out beautifully!

I made sure to keep most of the pumpkin seeds so I could roast them for our cookie decorating party. Unfortunately my friends didn't pay much attention to that and they threw a lot of their pumpkin guts in with my semi clean seeds. Oh well I had to clean them better anyways, it just took me a little more time to do it.

Here are all of our finished pumpkins. It's funny cause surprisingly Bobby's is one of my favorites. It is surprising because last year when we carved pumpkins Bobby's was pretty bad, maybe that was because he was using an oversized pocket knife or something like that, but this year his was pretty good and kind of creepy.

It was so funny cause when I was taking this picture I almost said one, two, three. I couldn't help it I am just so used to it, I guess I didn't care if they were inanimate objects or not. My friends made fun of me, but I laughed at myself too so it was all good.

Then we took a picture with all of us by our respective pumpkins. What a good lookin' group :)

This is that W-E-L-C-O-M-E pumpkin sign I was talking about earlier that I was super eager to make! I saw it on someone's blog and I had to make it! Then I put it out front on our pillar to welcome everyone to our home.
This is another one of my awesome goodwill finds! I got these two skeleton fists and we put them out at our cookie decorating party with these burnt orange candles and by the end of the party they looked pretty cool. I decided to leave them like this because they look all old and authentic.

So on Saturday Heather and I had planned to have a cookie decorating party so of course we had to make lots and lots of cookies! Actually my wonderful mother made them for us cause no one makes better cookies than she does! She ended up making 3 different types of cookies and probably a total of 300+ cookies and these are just some of them.
I took our pumpkin seeds from Friday night, found a recipe online, cleaned the seeds, and made some pretty tasty roasted pumpkin seeds:

• 1 1/2 tablespoons margarine, melted
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon garlic salt
• 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• 2 cups raw whole pumpkin seeds
• All you have to do is mix them all together and roast them in the oven at 275 degrees for about 1 1/2 hours. The directions said for an hour but I think the longer time is better. I also read some of the comments other women wrote and I quadrupled all of the ingredients except the pumpkin seeds. I put even more salt than that just cause I thought they tasted better like that but you can change it to your taste preference. They turned out really yummy, I was proud of myself!

Here is all the rest of the food we had out for the party, unfortunately no one seemed to hungry so we had a lot of left overs. Our refrigerator is super full now.
The party consisted of mostly Hannah's friends cause I think Heather's and my friends all forgot about it, but oh well we still had a lot of fun.



These are just a small portion of the finished cookies. It was ridiculous because everyone took at least two plates of cookies home and we still had tons left over at our house! Looks like our coworkers are going to be getting some awesomely decorate Halloween cookies otherwise I am going to eat them all and that just would not help my weight loss.
These were the cookies I decorated:

Overall this weekend and Halloween season has been a lot of fun for me! I have decided that fall is now a close second to winter in my favorite season category, even though in AZ we don't get to experience all of the changing leaves and such. I can still decorate my house and have fun with my friends and family! Hope everyone else has had as good of a fall as I have this year!!!!!