there's a light (over at Peeriemoot's place)

Particularly tough neeps this year!

Worth the effort though. I hung the jagged eyed neepie lantern outside the house while I took the kids out guising, carrying the other one with me and pausing to relight it every few minutes of course - there was hardly a breath of wind, but just enough combined with moving around I suppose! Every year I tell myself I'll get some of those little electric tealights, and every year I forget. However when we got back to the house the outside lantern was still burning, so that was pretty good going. Astonishing actually!

may contain traces of sugar

There has been a certain amount of Hallowe'en-inspired culinary creativity going on in the last couple of days.

 Miss M came home from school today with 'Dracula's dentures' today - two digestive biscuits, mini-marshmallows, icing sugar and food colouring. Pretty effective, don't you think?

And the Boy came had Home Ec. today so he came home with a chocolate apple - I'm quite relieved they didn't try toffee apples!

So they were happy eating their creation.

Miss M's school had their Hallowe'en disco last night so I was providing a bit of home baking. I made two batches of chocolate chip cookies because they're quick and easy, but they looked a bit boring so I did a quick batch of fairy cakes as well, and then looked on Pinterest for decorating inspiration, and rather regretted it. It turns out that some people really throw themselves into producing incredibly disgusting-looking Hallowe'en party food. I stuck with spiders' webs and eyeballs as being just gross enough to satisfy children, but not actually stomach churning to look at.

I'm not really cut out for fiddly cake decorating but these were reasonably easy using squeezy tubes of icing. Reasonably. That's me all baked out for a while though!

Mother's Ruin

Just not this mother.

Having investigated making scrambled egg, my next culinary adventure inspired by my fondness for crime fiction set in the first half of the 20th century was gin.
Specifically Gin and It, i.e. gin and Italian vermouth.

Despite my name I've never tried or even wanted to try gin, so this was genuinely new territory for me, or rather us, as My Beloved joined in.

So, gin. Gin, gin, gin. It's absolutely mingin' isn't it?

We tried Gin and It with varying proportions until the vermouth just about drowned out the gin. Then we tried gin and lemonade. At that point I gave up and had vermouth and lemonade which I *do* like. My Beloved persevered and tried gin and coke, gin and Irn Bru, and goodness knows what else. This evening we tried gin and tonic, it being the classic.

Not so.

Oh Em and indeed Gee.  Nasty medicinal topped with even nastier medicinal (I leave it to you which is which). It was like doing a Bushtucker Trial. I think we'll have to face it, we're just not cut out to be grownups...