Eerie Elegance

Lots of Haunted Hollywood Halloween progress this week with our happy Halloween Helpers, with our new theatre lobby blending new walls with the plaster effects & hanging the chandelier, more Egyptian treasures printed and painted, making more Mummy, filling & sanding our full-size sarcophagus, and finishing the stage for our Frankenstein Experiment!

Grocery shopping led to our once-a-year pumpkin spice infusion of goodies, plus a quick check at Marshalls & Target yielded a mini Halloween Haul! Marshalls is at maximum Halloween, including a couple more cat-safe haunted houses and dangly black cat earrings I couldn’t resist. Target is not yet full Code Orange, with back to school stock still under Halloween wall signs but seasonal endcaps around the store. I wasn’t going to buy anything yet until I saw the metal claw-footed cauldrons, then I added the silly TP and the spider tray & scrubber. Sorry I wasn’t dressed in full Halloweenwear this time!

After the professional siding project was completed at the Eerie Elegance Estate, I spent some hot summer days on my own stopgap siding solution of scraping, sanding & painting before any more sun damage would warp our wood siding beyond rescue. The top trims under the shingles are already too far gone, so I concentrated on all the red that was still salvageable. I got the whole wall finished facing the backyard where it bakes in sunshine every afternoon, except where I can’t squeeze any ladder in safely between the sunroom and the wall…and don’t look around the corner where I haven’t started yet…

Lots of Haunted Hollywood Halloween progress, including 3 days in a row of our labor of love over Labor Day Weekend! The big project was reassembling our pub stage flats into our theatre lobby, needing to build 2.5 more plywood flats and a new doorway header to make it fit my vision. Our Halloween Helpers have also been busy building Dracula’s Crypt, building our backyard stage, finishing painting Kong’s face, building our spider stand, starting the Corridor Cover, painting & crafting more teeth and Egyptian treasures, and even sanding & gluing our newly-3D-printed full-size sarcophagus!

Quite a special Halloween Haul today with more unique pumpkins for our porch and the perfect red velvet seats for our Haunted Hollywood Halloween movie theatre! Halloween Helpers and fellow haunters sent us a Facebook Marketplace listing and an estate sale that we could make in one road trip up to Oakland …and we beat the heat wave by enjoying car air conditioning during the hottest part of the day!

My favorite edible art project for our Mummy movie night was my serving stone of Scrumptious Scarabs, since I found the blue-green beauty in the frightful flesh-eating bugs from the 1999 movie! Look closely and you can see my sign says “Eat them before they eat you!”
This was inspired by other summer edible art leftovers of black cookie dough and black vegan royal icing. A friend had found oval metal cookie cutters on clearance, so gave me a few saying, “I know you’ll make something more interesting!” She was right! I did look for scarab 3D printed cookie cutter designs, but they didn’t match my vision, so I slightly bent an oval cutter into my scarab shape and started cutting my rolled dough. I used my wood sculpting tool to quickly add the grooves of the wings as a piping guide.
I got 4 dozen thin & crispy cookies from my leftover dough, which was a good amount to pace piping one wing at a time to keep the definition as the icing dried enough not to melt into the next wing. After all the icing dried overnight, I used teal edible shimmer dust leftover from our wedding cocktails, but since that didn’t paint well with vodka or water, I used some green metallic Wilton “cake paint” I’d bought along the way. The cake paint dried quickly, so I had to use a dry brush to tap & blend the shimmer dust immediately as each cookie was painted, then shake off the excess. I intentionally left the edges plain black as an illusion of more rounded wings. I was stunned by how they shimmered more purple-blue than teal at some angles! I had originally planned a gold platter, but since for the menu sign I used the attack scene inside the stone tomb, my serving stone slab seemed superb. There weren’t many cookies left after the party, so I’m glad we all succeeded in eating them before they ate us!

Thanks to guests bringing their own creative creations, we had several kinds of Yummy Mummies for our Mummy movie night menu, including inside sourdough sarcophagus-shaped Pharaoh Pizzas!
One of my summer movie night traditions for fifteen years now is custom-shaped sourdough personal size pizza crusts. If you are handmaking crusts anyway, why not try special shapes? Some of my more unique shapes have been Elsa snowflakes, Trek chevron Starfleetzas, Lego bricks, and even the Ghostbusters logo! Since we are finishing these pizzas on the grill, I parbake the shaped crusts in a 350F oven just enough so they hold their shape, keep them refrigerated between parchment paper or wax paper inside zip bags, and they even freeze very well if you have leftovers. These are always a hit with all ages, especially when cheese strips and sliced olive eyes are available to make your own mummy pizza!
My other Yummy Mummies were spiced apple cider cake baked in small skull silicone molds, then I hand-piped spiced buttercream wrappings with a ribbon tip just before serving. Royal icing would have crusted better so they wouldn’t stick together on the platter, but this spiced buttercream was leftover from my previous cake pop Frankenstein Faces, so I was glad to clear more space in my BakerSpace fridge for Halloween goodies coming soon!

We enjoyed sands both sweet & savory for our Mummy movie night menu!
Using a quickly-made cardboard mold and some powdered Parmesan cheese over the top, the Simon Family cheese ball became our Parmesan Pyramid! I lined the cardboard with plastic wrap, balanced it in a bowl, froze the cheese mixture solid overnight, then the pyramid had to thaw before the Parmesan would stick, let alone serve with boney knives!
I updated the movie poster image & tagline for our vanilla soft serve with “sandy” toppings into “Eye Scream: The sands will rise. The caramel will flow. The flavor will be unleashed. “ 😆 Glen found blonde apple pie Oreos to crumble, we had coconut flakes, graham cracker crumbs, toffee bits, some pretzel crunch toppings, mixed nuts, and salted caramel sauce to serve your own sundae…yum!

My custom cocktails for our Mummy movie menu were basic beverages with movie-specific signs, but I do love the plastic skeleton hands holding my “mummified” limes!
MummyRita: Rim your glass with natron salt from the mummification rituals, pour yourself a margarita, and add a mummified lime garnish in a skeletal hand. (I sliced fresh limes thin and dried them in a low-temperature oven to get the right desiccated look.)
Water Turns to Blood: Pour sparkling water of your choice into a glass, adding clear spirits as desired. Add raspberry syrup and watch your “water” turn to blood like the plagues of Ancient Egypt. (In the Mummy movie, everyone in the bar spits out his drink as they taste blood as one of the plagues hits.)