The Adventures of Anna: A October without Halloween is just unacceptable

One of the few faults of New Zealand is that they don't really celebrate Halloween. Fortunately for them, it's my favorite holiday.

Our flat (hence known as Flat 101) started planning a Halloween party back in August, but we were never really sure we could pull it off. As October started to speed by we took the plunge and sent out the invites to "Flat 101's Epic Jack-O-Lantern Carving Party", but were still unsure if we would even have pumpkins to carve. See, the problem is that without Halloween there aren't any real pumpkins(well, pumpkins as Americans know them, giant, orange and perfect for carving!) New Zealand only has little pumpkins that are mostly meat for cooking. Neither of those things make for a good pumpkin to carve so you can see why we were a little concerned. Brittany and I decided that we would need to test out the two different varieties we could find. The results were successful! We spent the next two weeks planning out how to make out party as epic as we possibly could- Brittany took control of decorating the flat, I handled(what else) but the food and Ruth offered sage advice to all problems and helped with everything.

Two days before we all headed out to find pumpkins, costumes, and get the ingredients for the yummyness I had planned. We cleaned out three grocery stores of suitable pumpkins- earning ourselves some interesting looks and one amusing conversation with a cashier. The cashier was utterly confused as to why we would want a cart full of pumpkins. Well she was confused until she figured out we were American, and then it made perfect sense.

The day before the party I started baking- and didn't stop until the party was about to start. Making for a total of 10 hours spent creating weird/creepy/yummy Halloween goodies. Was it worth it? Well, there wasn't a scrape of any of my creations left so, absolutely!

With multiple projects running at once, everything was definitely a team effort.Especially when it came to the dreaded frosting for the vampire cupcakes. We are extremely limited in our cookware, extremely. So our egg-white frosting needed to be hand beaten to achieve fluffiness- over a hour later, and with consistent trade off between flat mates we still couldn't get it to the right consistency. At this point we gave up and decided our vampire cupcakes would taste just fine even if the frosting was a little runny. I believe Ruth and Brittany are still nursing sore arms/wrists from beating the cursed icing.

In the end we ended up with Bone bread sticks, Finger shortbread, sugar cookies, worms and dirt, punch(with eyeballs in it) and an assortment of candy.

Meanwhile, the decorations went up:

Costumes? Well, what else are three nerdy girls supposed to dress up as except as Hogwarts students!

Three odd Hogwarts students- currently lacking their wands, and robe. (Photo thanks to Michael Adams)

And then came time for the party! Some people dressed up, some people didn't, some carved pumpkins and some merely watched the shenanigans and everyone(I hope!) had fun!