Halloween Tricks & Treats For Your Children!

Halloween isn’t just about creepy costumes and trick or treating – it’s also a great opportunity to throw a party, get inspired with ideas for new crafts or bake something special with your children. Here are a few ideas to get you started…

Creepy crafts

An easy one to begin with. Make some eerie ink blots, either just for fun or to create a striking party invitation or greetings card. All you need is colourful card (orange and black work well), some non toxic paints and crayons, pens and/or stickers for the children to embellish their inkblots after they’ve dried. Look here for ideas and see how scary you can make your ink blots!

We also love this spooky Halloween bunting and it’s easy to make too. You need coloured paper, scissors, glue, black marker, clothes pegs and a long bit of string. The variations are endless but your kids will love decorating each individual triangle to make the finished banner.

If drawing isn’t your thing, how about cheating with this great bat template. You just need some black card, googly craft eyes and string or elastic to hang up your finished bats. Or use different coloured card and let the children customise their bats with crayons.

Ghostly games

We love pumpkin bowling (for ourselves, never mind the kids!). Use a small, roundish pumpkin as your bowling ball and you can even cut some little finger holes into it for a more authentic bowling experience! You can use all sorts for your pins, but empty plastic bottles are probably easiest. Get your kids to fill them with cotton wool balls then draw a ghostly face on each with a black marker. You can fill them with a bit of sand too if you want to weigh them down a bit. Or draw some scary faces on white toilet rolls, stack them and see who can knock the whole lot down.

Another Halloween game idea is wrapping someone in toilet roll (bear with us) to turn them into a scary mummy. You can have two teams of children and turn it into a competition to wrap their person completely in toilet roll. Get them to do it to some parents and said Andrex parents can give the kids a little scare by coming to life and chasing them at the end of the game.

We also like this classic Halloween party idea. Prepare food such as boiled cauliflower (brains), chopped up boiled spaghetti (maggots), peeled grapes (eyes) and dried apricots (ears). You’ll probably be able to think of more of your own. Then turn out the lights and tell the children a spooky story, passing around the food in a bag or bowl for them to feel when it’s mentioned in the story. If you’ve got young children, don’t make the story too scary and reveal the ingredients at the end! (We don’t want any traumatised 3 year olds).

There’s a bat in the kitchen

If you’re into baking, particularly cupcakes, the opportunities for Halloween are endless. Just do a search for Halloween cupcakes on Pinterest and you’ll be deluged with icing ideas for tombstones, witches hats, spiders webs, eyeballs and much more. Our particular favourites might be a bit scary for little children, but they’re certainly unique for impressing party guests or sharing with the neighbours. These little cupcakes feature a teeny axe on top sitting in a pool of blood (corn syrup) – we just need to figure out how to make/where to buy those little axes…

For something a bit simpler, we really like this selection of Halloween treats, particularly the slime bug cups – essentially a cup of lime jelly topped up with creepy sweets – and Dracula’s blood punch, a delicious looking, blood red mocktail made with cherry juice, chilli, cinnamon, cloves and ginger.

There’s also a delicious pumpkin cake recipe, perfect for using up any leftover pumpkin after carving, or alternatively a yummy pumpkin risotto if you’ve had enough cake for one week thank-you-very-much.