It’s been a while since I’ve posted a fun treat. Here’s my “oh my goodness, I need to make 42 cupcakes” solution for some Halloween fun. I did not invent these, in fact a friend described to me that she was making spider cupcakes and I did a quick search on Google and found tons of variations.
Sadly, my digital camera decided to die a sad Error 18 death this week, so this grainy photo from my phone will have to do. Note that these are not up to Martha Stewart’s standards as my children insist on helping (can you imagine?!) and I have long ago decided that family fun far outweighs aesthetics. Oh, and my son was quick to point out that spiders have eight legs, but as many people mentioned in their instructions, eight legs get a big cumbersome on a cupcake. My son said spiders also have multiple eyes, but I informed him we were sticking to just two.
What you’ll need:
- cupcakes (we made Devil’s Food — I recommend some form of chocolate so you don’t have to do a perfect job of frosting them)
- chocolate icing of some sort (we used a chocolate fudge icing)
- something for legs — if you can find shoestring licorice, great, we couldn’t find that so we used pull apart cherry Twizzlers.
- something for eyes — we used M&Ms
Make the cupcakes and allow to cool. Recommendations online varied about doing legs before or after frosting, but we chose to do them before, poking them into the cupcakes themselves. I recommend putting them as close to the edge as possible and poking them downward (instead of at an angle) and then trimming so that the bottom hits the same point as the bottom of the cupcake. You can cut with kitchen scissors.
After that, smooth on icing with a knife or small icing spatula. You can just roll it right over the tops of the legs and don’t worry about icing underneath the legs (see the beauty of having chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing?) It does NOT have to be perfect — kids will eat these in a nanosecond. Plop on two eyes and you are done. I personally prefer that the Ms of the M&Ms are hidden, JavaGirl insists that they are face-up.
Some people like to add candy corn fangs to the front.
Other suggestions for legs are: pretzel rods, fat black licorce (these would be fat legs that stick straight out), and pipe cleaners (non-edible, of course).
The whole family was able to get involved – JavaDad attached legs, I frosted, and the kids added the eyes. The whole family was able to get involved – JavaDad attached legs, I frosted, and the kids added the eyes. JavaGirl was thrilled to take them to school today and JavaBoy can’t wait to take them to his class tomorrow. Seeing the pride in their eyes makes me glad I didn’t succumb to the temptation to just buy store-bought cupcakes.
Enjoy!
Motherhood isn’t all Jell-O and cute drawings on the fridge you know… it’s fraught with a lot of don’t-go-there thoughts. Especially for someone who not only watches lots of crime TV but has been a crime reporter and has seen some of the worst humanity can do.
You can get a glimpse of the dark corners or my maternal mind in my latest DC Metro Moms post, “Not on the School Supply List” today.
A slightly less dark and twisty post is my rant about DCMM post on Sunday about HOV lane cheaters.
A late-breaking entry to the Fall Fun Guide:
Library of Congress National Book Festival
Saturday, September 26 from 10am to 5:30pm
Join PBS Parents and PBS Parents Supersisters at 9am for a “pre” Book Festival meetup at the
PBS KIDS Raising Readers Pavilion.
You will have a chance to meet Elmo and Chris from SESAME STREET, Steve Songs, PBS KIDS favorite characters Clifford, WordGirl and many others.
The PBS KIDS Raising Readers Pavilion will be located in the middle of the Book Festival on the National Mall, near 10th St. and the Smithsonian Castle.
Fall began yesterday and the Fall Gun Guide is now officially up! Just like its Summer companion, the Fall Fun Guide is filled with classes and events for kids and families. Some are free, some are not, but somewhere in the guide there should be something for everyone. I am always looking for new things to add to the guide, so please contact me if you know of something that you think should be on there. And please check the guide frequently. The Fall Fun Guide is “younger” than the Summer Fun Guide, so it is still maturing and is not quite as far-reaching yet — it has lots of room to grow!
It includes a list of children’s consignment sales (coming up – My Child’s Closet and Catholic Consignments), pumpkin patches and corn mazes, a list of activities by dates, classes and events, day and weekend trips, and so much more!
Go check it out and then tell all your friends about it!
Oh — and start letting me know about events you think should be included in the HOLIDAY FUN GUIDE!!
When’s the last time your family really sat in close proximity with all screens (TV, computer, cell phone, etc.) off, and had a really good time together? Are you looking at your watch… or are you looking at a calendar? Or can you not remember it at all?
Every summer we go on a trip to a huge beach house with several families and though I love the sea and the sand, one of the things I most look forward to is playing games together in the evenings. It’s actually the adults who play, after the children are asleep, but it won’t be long until the kids will be old enough to join in. These evenings remind me of countless rounds of Parcheesi, Monopoly, Yahtzee and card games my family played while growing up. I can’t remember a Thanksgiving that didn’t end with a rousing game of some sort.
It’s these simple pleasures, these unplugged moments that are the inspiration for National Family Game Night on September 23, sponsored by Hasbro Games. Of course they have a reason to encourage game play, but in an age when the economy is tight and technology sometimes makes us forget to look at each other, isn’t the idea of spending a night of old-fashioned fun a bit appealing?
Whether you just dust off some games you already own, or decide to go out and purchase some new ones — consider indulging in National Family Game Night this Wednesday and then turning it into a regular habit. If you want to go all out, Hasbro even has some tips for planning game night on their web site.
We actually held ours a little early — we tried two new games, Bop It! and Connect 4X4. Bop It! is this crazy little device that issues commands to press a button (bop it!), twist a knob, pull a knob, or yell into a microphone, in a rapidfire succession in a random pattern. We are clearly a very uncoordinated family and this generated tons of laughter! Connect 4×4 is an updated version of Connect 4 where there are two grids side by side and you can get your 4-in-a-row in all the traditional ways but also by weaving between the two grids. This was a HUGE hit with the kids. They are already clamoring for another game night and I’m happy to indulge them!
In every situation where I have played games with people — whether my own family, as part of a team-building exercise at a business retreat, with a group of grown-up friends — I have found that the after-effects last far longer than the game itself. People always seem to feel more closely bonded, more patient about listening to each other, more interested in working through things. Which makes me wonder, during these times, what would happen in this nation if we dumped a truckful of Bop Its outside the US Capitol building? (Oh no, I fear this post could take a dreadful turn for the worse… perhaps I should’ve suggested Cranium?)
I was at a retreat of local business leaders and when asked to “dream blue skies” about things to change in the county, one thing each round table came back with was that we don’t have enough fun as a society. How sad is that? We all agreed our county had terrific parks and recreation centers, and yet people were feeling like there was never any time for fun. The barrier wasn’t access to fun, it was prioritizing fun. CHOOSING to have fun.
Will you choose to have fun? Whether this Wednesday or another night, will you participate in some form of a game night in the near future?
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Bop It! photo is from the Hasbro Games web site.
I have always loved sharing my opinions of products with friends — and now that I have a blog, I can not only share those opinions with you, I can also sometimes provide feedback to the companies who make the products. BlogHer is an organization for women who blog (well, that’s the simple explanation) and I respect what they have to say, and they have recommended that reviews be kept separate from other content, so I have launched a separate site, Caffeinated Reviews, so I can bring you “Honest reviews with PEP!” in addition to what I write here.
I am thrilled that my inaugural review is the PlasmaCar toy because it was a really fun product to review — a toy that both kids and parents can enjoy! So please check out the new blog — blogs are always a work in progress so pardon any cyber-dust as I’ll probably continue to tinker with it for a few weeks — and read the first review and comment! I have more reviews coming and soon, JavaDad and another dad soon to reveal his online identity will be joining me to do some guest reviews from the dad perspective.
I had to laugh when I realized what the topic at JuiceBox Jungle was this week — giving up the pacifier.
More parenting videos on JuiceBoxJungle
It was almost exactly a year ago that we went through this very battle in our own household and wrote a post on our private family site. I honestly didn’t think we were going to get through this part of childhood, so for your amusement, I’m sharing my angst-ridden post of a year ago to our family:
They Shoot Fat Women, Don’t They? was the title of a 1989 episode of a TV show called Designing Women. In the episode the character played by Delta Burke, Suzanne Sugarbaker, always proud of her beauty queen looks, realized that she was now seen as “the fat girl” by her friends at a high school reunion. She was awarded the “Most Changed” trophy at her fifteen year reunion, as a snark at her physical appearance, and she accepted the award with a lovely speech letting everyone know that she was going to take it as a testimony of how she has changed from shallow beauty to a woman of intellectual and emotional substance rather than the hurtful comment on her weight gain it was originally intended.
I remember reading an article about this particular episode a long time ago, because the episode was written specifically to address Burke’s real-life weight gain. She was a gorgeous, sexy slender woman when hired, and her weight gain became a problem on set between Burke and the show’s producers/writers. Burke’s weight gain was due to a combination of physical and psychological issues and the more she felt pressured about it, the worse it got. Since then, her weight has see-sawed and she has launched a line of plus-sized clothing. At some point she shifted from running from her weight to trying to help others who were heavy feel better about it.
I’m outing myself as a fat woman. I have been terrified of old friends seeing photos of me online in the shape I am in currently and I have decided to end the terror now.
I still feel a thrill every time I get ready to go on a trip. Maybe more so now that I’m a stay-at-home mother — the last couple of years of my career I didn’t travel as often as I did in previous years and I miss that. So I’m in that adrenaline high right now of packing up for a plane ride… BY MYSELF. Let’s face it, it is much different packing up to go on a (quasi) business trip than packing up to go on trip with the family. I’m headed off to BlogHer and I won’t be taking a car seat, a portable DVD player, Matchbox cars, crayons, any Leap Frog toys, etc. Just my own overstuffed suitcase.
But the question everyone asks me is, “How are the kids going to handle it?”
I’m trying (emphasis on trying) to be one of those matter-of-fact parents when it comes to the tough issues. It’s a technique that works well with JavaBoy, the jury is still out on which parenting technique (if any) works well for JavaGirl. So when one of our older cats was not looking well last week [...]
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a fun treat. Here’s my “oh my goodness, I need to make 42 cupcakes” solution for some Halloween fun. I did not invent these, in fact a friend described to me that she was making spider cupcakes and I did a quick search on Google and found tons of variations. 
