My Latest over at CAGW: Vegan Sugar Skulls and Last-Minute Jack-o-Lanterns

a round-up of last-minute Jack-o-lanterns to make before Halloween

and a description of the vegan sugar skulls that I made and had the girls decorate:

I might turn el Dia de los Muertos into a larger study next year (I lived for a while in Texas, so it's a celebration that I'm fond of), but these particular sugar skulls got made rather spontaneously, after the girls and I attended a yoga class at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures last week, and the craft time after the class consisted of... decorating sugar skulls! I figured that they couldn't be TOO hard to make if the instructor was willing to make two dozen of them just for small children to decorate.

It turns out that sugar skulls ARE very easy to make! Conventional sugar skull recipes call for meringue powder, but my secret trick is, if a recipe looks complicated or has weird ingredients, to search for a vegan version, and yep, cornstarch IS easier to find than meringue powder.

Will went minimalistic on her sugar skull, although she's received a lot of compliments on those creepy, sequined eyes:

She had a lot more fun, I think, and made her skull a lot more elaborate, at the Mathers, where there were a ton more things to put on the skulls that we don't have at home--rhinestones, pom poms, googly eyes in lots of sizes, feathers, etc.--so that the hoarder in me wonders if I'm stalling her creativity by not having a bunch of random crap on hand to glue to things. Perhaps I'll set a small bin in the study where we can deposit found objects of decorative potential?

Syd didn't end up gluing anything to her sugar skull, but she and I sat down together before she began and looked at lots of images of sugar skulls online, so her work ends up looking quite traditional, I think, considering that I gave her Sharpies instead of royal icing:

I LOVE how the sugar skulls turned out, and how sturdy they are:

I don't own any other large molds like this, but I'm already thinking of sugar decorations for other holidays...

Sugar turkey?

DEFINITELY a sugar Christmas tree!

Homemade Peanut Butter

Sydney has been so obsessed with peanut butter lately. Seriously--peanut butter toast for breakfast, peanut butter toast for lunch, peanut butter toast for snacks in between. Her little body must be craving the fat and the protein, because I can tell that she's in the middle of a growth spurt, but still, that's a two jar a week habit that the kid has!

To turn her love of spreadable legumes into a homeschool science project, I bought a bag full of raw peanuts from the bulk bin at the grocery store. Syd poured them into our blender, turned it on--

--gave it a good mixin'--

--and made peanut butter! If you don't own an overpowered blender like we do, you'll likely need to add some peanut oil to the mix to help it blend, but we could grind up a car in our blender if we wanted to.

Sadly, Sydney does not prefer our homemade peanut butter to the store-brand organic jarred peanut butter that I usually purchase. Even more sadly, I did not purchase any more jarred peanut butter during my last grocery run, since I knew we were going to make homemade peanut butter, and there's not another grocery trip in the budget until April, alas.

Ideally, Syd will develop a taste for the homemade stuff. She's also intrigued by my demonstration that with homemade peanut butter, you can blend yumminess in. Strawberry peanut butter, anyone?

I may have to get out the big guns and make honey peanut butter next. Maple syrup peanut butter?

Chocolate chip peanut butter.

Pumpkin Monkey Bread, Or, Why I Have Heartburn

Trolling for other uses for my last pound or so of pumpkin pie brioche from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, I happened upon this pumpkin pie brioche monkey bread recipe from  Something Shiny. It's a brilliant recipe, surprisingly similar to our baked donuts, and the process was easy to make kid-friendly (and vegan!).

Basically, you put some Earth Balance in a bowl and nuke it til it's melted, and you put cinnamon, sugar, and pumpkin pie spice in another bowl and whisk it together. Everything else is the same as the recipe at Something Shiny--greased bundt pan, oven set to 350 degrees, pumpkin pie brioche dough ready and waiting.

Tear off a hunk of bread dough, roll it into a ball, dunk it in the melted Earth Balance--

 --roll it around in the cinnamon-sugar--

--and pop it in the pan. Repeat:

 Bake that big ol' mess for 35 minutes, turn it out of the pan, and gasp at the awesomely butter-shiny deliciousness that now rests in front of you:

Normally, at this point I'd show you a picture of us eating and enjoying our monkey bread, but I have to tell you, sometimes something is so delicious that your family digs right in and starts eating it, and you look at them tearing off pieces of monkey bread and shoving them in their mouths, sputtering through those full mouths at how yummy each mouthfull is, and you think...

We'll just not take a picture of people eating like wolverines today. Use your imagination instead, if you must.

And yes, I think that cinnamon-sugar gives me heartburn.