Eerie Elegance

Major progress this week on our Haunted Hollywood Halloween! This season’s greenscreen filming is in the can after a long but fun filming evening! Our other Halloween Helpers have been cranking though other projects like finishing the backyard stage with walls standing, adding lovely lips on our pumpkin plants, more Mummy and WolfMan work, starting skinning crates, and lots of painting walls & Egyptian treasures!

I tried a fourth edible experiment of Monster Mask Munchies for our last NorCal Haunters meeting before Halloween…but is this the winning combination yet…?
This time I baked the same apple c***r cakelet recipe, increasing the spices yet again, and including my hand sculpted silicone Bride mold this time! After they cooled, I added a plain vanilla glaze, spooning over the bowl to keep using the glaze for the next cakes, letting them drip & dry on cooling racks. I left the cats and werewolves mostly just glazed except for teeth and eyes, but for the others I couldn’t resist painting over the glaze with ChocoWhite mixed with food coloring. There were more Brides than others because her food-grade silicone mold released perfectly without flour, so she was ready for another bake while I was still washing, drying, oiling & flouring the non-stick metal pan!
My large spider tray filled with round four of Monster Mask Munchies transported fine covered with plastic cradled safely on my lap, our fellow haunters approved of the spice level and texture, and Halloween Helpers enjoyed them the next day, appreciating the donut-like mouthfeel, but the glaze cracks off so easily ruining the painting work. The other monsters still look okay a little rough, but I was sad that the Bride’s chin & cheek chunks fell off!
I’m not completely satisfied with any of these four methods, and I am running out of time to experiment before Halloween. Since the fondant was best to paint and didn’t crack when chomping, I am wondering if I can roll the fondant thinner, lay it over the cakelet, then push together into the mold? Hmm…

Another Eerie Elegance Estate upgrade! After 8 hot summer weeks of patiently waiting as both our new awnings were manufactured in Germany, our install was finally scheduled for the tail end of August…however, the sunroom awning endcap was damaged, and several calls to support determined they would have to wait for a new part before installing, which is still pending almost a month later. Thankfully all the parts were fine for our new retractable barbecue counter awning to be completely installed with color-changing dimmable lights, and we inaugurated it serving thank-you pizza & burgers to our Halloween Helpers over Labor Day weekend!

Lots of Haunted Hollywood Halloween progress this week with our happy Halloween Helpers, with our new theatre lobby blending new walls with the plaster effects & hanging the chandelier, more Egyptian treasures printed and painted, making more Mummy, filling & sanding our full-size sarcophagus, and finishing the stage for our Frankenstein Experiment!

Grocery shopping led to our once-a-year pumpkin spice infusion of goodies, plus a quick check at Marshalls & Target yielded a mini Halloween Haul! Marshalls is at maximum Halloween, including a couple more cat-safe haunted houses and dangly black cat earrings I couldn’t resist. Target is not yet full Code Orange, with back to school stock still under Halloween wall signs but seasonal endcaps around the store. I wasn’t going to buy anything yet until I saw the metal claw-footed cauldrons, then I added the silly TP and the spider tray & scrubber. Sorry I wasn’t dressed in full Halloweenwear this time!

After the professional siding project was completed at the Eerie Elegance Estate, I spent some hot summer days on my own stopgap siding solution of scraping, sanding & painting before any more sun damage would warp our wood siding beyond rescue. The top trims under the shingles are already too far gone, so I concentrated on all the red that was still salvageable. I got the whole wall finished facing the backyard where it bakes in sunshine every afternoon, except where I can’t squeeze any ladder in safely between the sunroom and the wall…and don’t look around the corner where I haven’t started yet…

Lots of Haunted Hollywood Halloween progress, including 3 days in a row of our labor of love over Labor Day Weekend! The big project was reassembling our pub stage flats into our theatre lobby, needing to build 2.5 more plywood flats and a new doorway header to make it fit my vision. Our Halloween Helpers have also been busy building Dracula’s Crypt, building our backyard stage, finishing painting Kong’s face, building our spider stand, starting the Corridor Cover, painting & crafting more teeth and Egyptian treasures, and even sanding & gluing our newly-3D-printed full-size sarcophagus!

Quite a special Halloween Haul today with more unique pumpkins for our porch and the perfect red velvet seats for our Haunted Hollywood Halloween movie theatre! Halloween Helpers and fellow haunters sent us a Facebook Marketplace listing and an estate sale that we could make in one road trip up to Oakland …and we beat the heat wave by enjoying car air conditioning during the hottest part of the day!

My favorite edible art project for our Mummy movie night was my serving stone of Scrumptious Scarabs, since I found the blue-green beauty in the frightful flesh-eating bugs from the 1999 movie! Look closely and you can see my sign says “Eat them before they eat you!”
This was inspired by other summer edible art leftovers of black cookie dough and black vegan royal icing. A friend had found oval metal cookie cutters on clearance, so gave me a few saying, “I know you’ll make something more interesting!” She was right! I did look for scarab 3D printed cookie cutter designs, but they didn’t match my vision, so I slightly bent an oval cutter into my scarab shape and started cutting my rolled dough. I used my wood sculpting tool to quickly add the grooves of the wings as a piping guide.
I got 4 dozen thin & crispy cookies from my leftover dough, which was a good amount to pace piping one wing at a time to keep the definition as the icing dried enough not to melt into the next wing. After all the icing dried overnight, I used teal edible shimmer dust leftover from our wedding cocktails, but since that didn’t paint well with vodka or water, I used some green metallic Wilton “cake paint” I’d bought along the way. The cake paint dried quickly, so I had to use a dry brush to tap & blend the shimmer dust immediately as each cookie was painted, then shake off the excess. I intentionally left the edges plain black as an illusion of more rounded wings. I was stunned by how they shimmered more purple-blue than teal at some angles! I had originally planned a gold platter, but since for the menu sign I used the attack scene inside the stone tomb, my serving stone slab seemed superb. There weren’t many cookies left after the party, so I’m glad we all succeeded in eating them before they ate us!