Cookies and Candids

Halloween is quickly approaching – and if you weren’t aware of it, I can help you out. I can tell it’s Halloween time for a few reasons:

1. The weather has gotten crisper and windier, and the red and gold leaves are blowing off the trees into huge piles in my backyard.

2. There are pumpkins everywhere; carved and whole. There are ghosts hanging from trees, and goblins and spiderwebs peeking from behind windows and creeping out on front lawns.

3. I am student teaching in a Kindergarten classroom and the students are excited about Halloween, to say the least. In preparation, we’ve made black paper bats that hang from the windows and pumpkin-shaped paper-chain calendars to countdown till the very day, we’ve measured pumpkins up and down and weighed them and even got to make predictions about what might be inside a pumpkin — and then the kids got to stand on the picnic tables outside and smash them onto the ground to find out! We’ve also been reading Halloween books for weeks. Books about counting and math, about the alphabet, about helping friends, about trick-or-treating, about being kind to each other, about making mistakes, and about making good choices. Besides these good-community-oriented and academic themes, the books involve witches and scarecrows and ghosts and bats and monsters, which captures every student’s attention. We even read a book about a witch who baked her grumpy day into a cake! It went right along with my lesson plan theme, which was to cook pumpkin pancakes! I’ve been teaching small groups of four, five, and six year olds how to make these delicious pancakes all week, and finally the cinnamon smells got the best of me.

The Fall weather, the Halloween spirit, and the pumpkin pancake cooking ingredients all came together to form these cute little cupcake critters. As soon as I saw Lindsay’s post about her creations, I knew I had to decorate some cupcakes just like she did! I used her recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cupcakes, and added a ton of cinnamon to a basic vanilla buttercream frosting to top mine off. Aren’t they perfect?