I am afraid that this is the extent of my Halloween creativity this year! Here are my simple chocolate Halloween decorations. Once you’ve piped them and left them to cool, you can use them to decorate cakes or tarts.  I am not one to spend lots and lots of time on gimmicky food treats. By the time the little ones have been out ‘Trickle Treating’ as they call it, all they want is their bed! We are going to be carving our pumpkins later on and we have lots of scary costumes and face painting to tackle, too!

These chocolate decorations are as simple as melting some chocolate, I used 200g plain chocolate and 200g milk chocolate and melted it in a Pyrex bowl over some gently simmering water. Once the chocolate had melted, I carefully poured it into a piping bag, fitted with a fairly small writing nozzle.

To make life easier, I drew my shapes onto some baking or parchment paper with a pencil, then flipped the paper over and piped my chocolate onto the sheet of paper. You need quite a steady hand, but there should be enough chocolate to have some fun with different shapes, for example, I made bats, pumpkins, ghosts as well as cobwebs. 

Once I piped the chocolate, I carefully transfered the paper onto a flat shelf in the freezer to allow the chocolate to set, before taking them out and carefully peeling the chocolate decorations away from the paper.

The main issue I had was that once the chocolate shapes hit room temperate, they began to melt, so use them to decorate your cakes or whatever you have close to the time you want to eat them!

We  are having  a locally baked, Bakewell tart – I have told the children the almonds are witches nails, as well as jammy Swiss rolls, which the children enjoy unravelling and pretending they are intestines….how delightful!

For the evening, after Trick or Treating, we’re having a bubbling cauldron of Nigella’s Rapid Ragu, as made for Halloween last year.

Happy Halloween!