Last minute Halloween

• Dark Chocolate Martini at The Spirit World. (Such a pretty photo of it too.)
• Matt recommends Zombie Pumpkins for your pumpkin stencil needs.
• Cute pumpkin cupcakes with white chocolate chunks and cream cheese frosting, yum. At Cupcake Bakeshop.
• Alton Brown spooky edible eyes and acid jellies.
• Toasted Pumpkin Seeds: Three Ways, at 101 Cookbooks.
• Kay made a snack cake spider and I am proud. Jessamyn has another shot and mentions that on the East Coast Ding Dongs are called Ring Dings. When I was buying them I couldn't shake the feeling that Ding Dongs was the wrong name and now I know why.

Do you live in Seattle? Do you like the Rat City Roller Girls? It's time to give them some help, their home at Hangar 27 is being threatened. Read about it here, go to the meeting tonight at City Hall at 5:30 p.m. (details here at Metrobloggig Seattle), and write or call to let the powers that be know how you feel, contact information including email addresses is here.

How to keep a Halloween Jack O' Lantern from Rotting? According to this experiment at My Science Project, do nothing. They tried a variety of methods - bleach, Pumpkin Fresh, white glue, Vaseline, acrylic spray and a control - and found that the untreated pumpkin was almost the best bet. I wonder how the WD-40 that Extreme Pumpkins recommends using would stand up?

Halloween link dump:

• Halloween Monster List
• Cylon Jack-o-lantern at Evil Mad Scientist
• how to make cheap hair extensions at May 5th
• flickering light fixture at Ask Metafilter
• ghost cupcake on Flickr, so cute
• Halloween cupcakes from The Cupcake Queen
• brining pumpkin seeds, good tip at The Kitchen

  old but still good stuff from Martha Stewart:

• creepcakes
• boonilla shakes
• ladies fingers
• pumpkin seed candy
• halloween candies

  other round ups

• treats at The Kitchen
• drinks and such at The Spirit World
• my own collection of food too disgusting to eat at Readymade

  and Thimble has a great bunch of Halloween posts on lots of stuff:

• projects
• knit and crochet patterns
• knitted wig patterns
• last minute costume
• ornaments
• wreaths

This morning I found a way to make hard boiled eggs which was completely new to me - steaming. Simply, put a vegetable steamer in a pot and a little water, add eggs and a lid and let the water boil for 11 or 12 minutes. Transfer the eggs to ice water for a few minutes, and find that they are quite easy to peel. The eggs were well done, no green bits and nothing was too rubbery. While the method of bringing eggs to an almost boil and letting them sit for 15 minutes seems to be the most popular, I never caught them before the boiling, and then I would inevitably leave them too long despite my frantic use of a kitchen timer. The steaming method means I don't have to watch them as closely. I found it in Alton Brown's I'm Just Here For the Food, and a few cooking forums I Googled gave the method thumbs up.

p.s. Craft magazine has officially hit the stands. It's small like Make, and delightfully heavy.

I like to add lemon to my water but I'm fickle about it, resulting in too many tightly wrapped lemon halves lurking in the back of the fridge. So I tried True Lemon and I'm surprised to report that I like it. I'm not so sure about all the recipes on the True Lemon site, and Cook's Illustrated recently gave thumbs down to using it in baked goods. But for adding to drinks it's better than, you know, digging suspicious produce out of the crisper drawer.

They're here - last weekend I made crawly things for Halloween, I used snack cakes for the bodies and Pocky for the legs. They were really fun to make, and now I have a whole lot of junk food in the house. Details here.

They're coming. Soonish.

One more post about clothes - I like this shirt from Old Navy so well I went back and got a couple more colors. In the store this is called the Perfect Fit V-Neck. It's made of a soft lightweight cotton, it stretches and hugs in all the right ways, and when paired with a tank top it has a neckline that Susannah would approve of.