A brie and blackberry Scream platter and a Halloween lunch

Yesterday we had a wonderful Halloween lunch with most of the food preparation being done by my daughter and my mum.  Sylvia's Scream platter and my mum's black forest cake were the highlights.  I struggled to find inspiration, especially when I found my collection of Halloween ideas had disappeared from my Pinterest account.  But Sylvia was full of great ideas.  She managed to keep it simple with no baking this year, unless you include mummy sausages.

Soon after Alex and Ian were stillborn, we started our tradition of a lunch on the day (or nearby) each year in their memory.  At first it was just a birthday lunch of sorts but over the years it has morphed into a Halloween themed lunch because the kids love it.   Their birthday, 1 November, is the Day of the Dead in Mexico is a day to honour dead children and infants so I assume it is not so unusual to have a Halloween lunch on this date each year to remember dead babies there but I am not sure many others do this in Melbourne.

The accidental inclusion in the Halloween lunch was the mushroom skull pizza that Sylvia made the previous night.  She had seen it on social media and wanted to try it.  We used quite small button mushrooms which were quite shrunken on the first night and even harder to find in the crispy pizza pieces that I reheated the next day.

Sylvia found that a metal straw was the best for the eyes, a skewer to make nostril holes and a knife to make the teeth marks on the stems.  This meant quite a bit of cleaning out a metal straw with a skewer and a thin bottle cleaner for straws.  It was a year of straw cleaning as you will see below.

Here is Sylvia's piece de resistance.  She found the Ghost Face shaped brie on social media and decided she must make it.  It looks impressive is quite simple.  A round of brie is carved into the famous face from the Scream movie franchise.  Holes are made for the face that are then filled with jam.  Blackberries around it add to the effect.  It is the perfect centrepiece for a cheese and fruit board.

Fortunately I had made some blackberry chia jam (based on this recipe) earlier in the week.  It was just the thing for the eyes, nostrils and mouth.  Chia jam is easy and far more fruity than sugary compared to regular jam and I much preferred it here.  Honestly I find that Ghost Face really creepy, though I am not sure I have ever seen Scream.  But there was something quite fun about doing it this way.

While Sylvia was the creative genius behind all the platters I helped with some chopping and arrangements.  Even then I did not feel there was much for me to chop once Sylvia had made all her Halloween pieces.  Which was probably just as well because I spent a lot of the morning giving the lounge room a much-needed clean.

This platter was to be our vegies and fruit platter but once I had added some cherry tomatoes and chopped some nectarines (praise be the arrival of stone fruit in our supermarkets!) I realised there was not much room once we had added all Sylvia's preparations.  I have already mentioned the mushroom ghost pizza above.  It also had cucumber ghosts, carrot ghosts, banana ghosts, hotdog mummies (made previously) and vampire doughnuts.

The vampire doughuts were a social media idea that involved squeezing plastic vampire teeth into a ring doughnut.  The doughnuts were brought along by E close to when we were to start lunch and Sylvia found it quite challening to fit the teeth into the hole (we had chosen the Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts for a bigger hole than other doughnuts we saw).  We also had to hunt down our candy eyes which were in the first place Sylvia looked but sometimes we need to look a few times!  I thought they were cute but looked more like grandpa doughnut than vampire doughnut.

Sylvia also wanted to make ghosts of cucumbers and carrots with two different sized metal straws.  She discovered that tiny pieces of carrot are very difficult to get out a a metal straw but she managed to clean them out.  She also made ghosts out of bananas and choc chips.

As so often happens, we ran out of energy and didn't make as much as planned.  There just wasn't time to make the apple slices with rice bubble teeth and fruit roll up tongues not to do the smores with chocolate covered digestives, marshmallows and candy eyeballs on top of the melted marshmallow.

Another easy Halloween snack was the baguettes with black olive spiders on a pesto and cream cheese mixture.  They were really tasty
.

Here is our cat Shadow eyeing off the olive spiders.  He loves to bat at a spider or insect if it comes his way so I have an idea what he might have been thinking.  

I didn't take photos of Sylvia's punch but it was lovely with all the food.  (It usually has a good handful of mint but not this year when the mint in our garden was parched.)  She used apricot nectar, pineapple juice, ginger ale and sparkling water.

Finally we sliced up the delicious black forest cake that my mum had made the previous day to give it time to absorb the cherry juice and soften.  It was really good but very filling after all our snacking the platters.  A fine lunch was had by all.

On the Stereo:
When the Pawn... - Fiona Apple