It's an annual tradition for my daughter and I to host a Halloween party for her and her cousins/friends. We have so much fun doing it, so here I am to post about what fun we had at this years. I hope everyone has had a fantastically spooky month of October and that this post can give you some ideas for fun Halloween games, snacks, drinks and fun in the future!
Here they all are, don't they look so cute? Love all the personality that comes out in the group picture every year. Such a wonderful keepsake to look back on over the years and see how much they all have grown. You can see in this picture a little witch prop we have to take pictures with. It's the perfect size for the kiddos to pose with. A big party tip of mine is having a great backdrop set up to take pictures. This year we went for a lot of spider webbing outside, inflatable bats stuck in, glow in the dark skeletons hanging around, and of course the little witch. You can find all sorts of Halloween character props like that witch at party stores. Looking for good deals after Halloween to use for the next year is always a good idea.
And of course we had to get a mother daughter shot in our Monster High costumes. In this picture you can see more of our spider webbing and decorations, including some characters my daughter actually made on the taped up on the inside of the window, visible from the outside. That's always one of my daughters favorite things to do decorating, she goes outside and tells me where to position them/tape them up.
Now on to more party details!
I didn't go around and take pictures specifically of ALL of the decor, but the hope was that in the pictures I did take the background would look nice and Halloweeny. So look for decor in the backgrounds of other pictures and I'll be adding in what we did! This was an area that my daughter set up all on her own, it was a little play exploration area for the kiddos and where they could pick up their goodie bags at the end.
We love using creepy cloth around a lot of the furniture in the room we have most of the party in to up the creepy decor factor. We also love hanging creepy skeletons on the furniture as well, like the bride and clown. You can see all the stuff my daughter set up that she thought would be fun and entertaining for the kids to look at and play around with (skeletons of animals, skeleton rings, plastic snakes/rats/spiders, light up/talking Halloween toys, Halloween erasers, vampire teeth, etc.) There was also a bowl with all of the goodie bags in it.
Food Food Food...
Here was our Halloween party food counter display! We had a Halloween table cloth on the counter, and sparkly jack-o-lantern confetti on it. It started with cute little paper plates and napkins so everybody could grab one and then grab what they wanted. Then we had Dracula Doughnuts, Frozen Brains, Caramel Covered Mini Apples, Pumpkin Patch Snack Mix, Halloween Whoopie Pies, Halloween Frozen Yogurts, and Cauldron Chips & Dip (all recipes below). For drinks we had green hot chocolate, and Putrid Bug Potion. I of course had out my "Eat Drink and Be Scary" sign that I printed out a couple years ago. I also had out some cute little decorations that were like poison bottles with funny names on them, and some skeleton hand tongs.
Dracula Doughnuts:
Ingredients:
- Glazed doughnuts, we used Krispie Kremes
- Plastic vampire fangs, we used different colors (purple, green, and orange)
- Candy eyes
- Black icing
- Red icing
Making these is really fun to do with kiddos, so if you're throwing a party for your little one let them help out with these for sure. Helpful tip: spend a little bit of time bending the fangs into position first, so they don't open up a lot once you've placed them in the doughnut. Stick your bent fangs into the holes in the doughnuts, add on the candy eyes, and icings for the hair and blood drips coming from the mouth. I had my daughter use white icing actually to stick on the candy eyes with, and she helped with the other icings as well.
The kids loved them!
Frozen Brains:
Ingredients:
- A plastic gelatin brain mold, like this one
- Baking spray, for spraying the jello mold with first to make it easier to get the brain out later
Make the jello according to the package directions for use with a mold, following the tip about the baking spray. I made this the day before the party just to make sure it was ready for the party. I put it on a cool black plate with detailing, perfect to display the Frozen Brains.
Love this picture of my best friends daughter staring at the Frozen Brains.
Pumpkin Patch Snack Mix:
Ingredients:
- Chex Mix
- Candy Corn
- Brach's Halloween Mellowcreme Pumpkins
All you have to do to make this yummy, fun snack mix is add all the ingredients to a bowl and mix them up a little bit! Salty and sweet, yum!
Halloween Frozen Yogurts:
Ingredients:
- Yogurt, whatever flavors you'd like. I like to try to match yogurt colors with what makes sense for the shapes I'm making. (purplish/bluish for frozen fingers is perfect, white is perfect for bones) Other colors work for random things, I used pink this year for brains, spiders, and spider webs. Purplish for the frozen fingers.
- Rubber silicone Halloween ice trays, like these
All you need to do to make these is put the yogurt into the tray, cover it with Saran wrap and put it in the freezer. These are something I would make the night before just to make sure they are ready to go for the party! They should only take a few hours though to freeze up.
Cauldron Chips & Dip:
Ingredients:
- Tortilla chips, scoop style
- Guacamole
- A cauldron
All you need to do for this is pour a bag of chips into a cauldron, and set out some dip for them as well.
Caramel Covered Mini Apples:
Ingredients:
- Apples, whatever kind you like, I used Honey Crisp
- Melon Baller
- Wilton Caramel Apple Dip
- Halloweeny sprinkles, optional, or other toppings
To make these take your apples and a melon baller and make mini apple pieces. Stick lollipop sticks into your mini apples. Next, heat up caramel according to package directions, and swirl all mini apples in it to coat them. If you want to add toppings dip the mini apples into a bowl of the toppings directly after you coat them in the caramel. Set them a parchment paper covered baking sheet to set, you may want to put them in the fridge depending on how much time there is until your party.
Halloween Whoopie Pies:
You can make Whoopie Pies following this recipe, and then you can color the filling like I did (orange, purple, and neon green to look Halloweeny) by splitting the filling into bowls and adding in some drops of food coloring and stirring it in before you add it to the cake pieces. You can also add colored sugar sprinkles to the sides by rolling the assembled whoopie pies in them.
For the Drinks:
I made a drink called "Putrid Bug Potion" that I got the recipe for in a book of Halloween party food ideas that I got from a grocery store a while back, I can't find it online anywhere. But, here's what I used to make it: lime sherbet, a grape packet of Koolaid, ginger ale, and pineapple juice with frozen grapes on top.
We also had some green hot chocolate that I found packets of at Walgreens. They were in the Halloween section with the Evil Queen from Snow White's face on them.
Now on to games...
We played Halloween Bingo, Witch Hat Ring Toss, Halloween Twist & Shout, and did some cookie decorating.
They had a lot of fun playing Witch Hat Ring Toss as well. You can see the skeleton door cover on the door in the background, the cauldron backdrop on the wall, and some other decorations adding to the Halloween party cuteness.
And always a favorite, Cookie Decorating
I found a really awesome kit that had pumpkin shaped cookies, green/orange/black icing, and different sets of sprinkles. Cookie decorating is always a big hit at parties with kiddos. They had so much fun decorating their cookies, and it's amazing how different they all turn out when given the same materials. Such a fun, creative process art activity.
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