This is Halloween

I know I might be posting late since its the 8th of November, but this is the only day that I could find a little free time!.

 Hope you all  had a happy Halloween my friends. I did celebrate Halloween for the first time in a big way!.
Over here Halloween is not celebrated the way America and Canada do!. How can I put it...its more of a  church thing, we call it "all souls day" and it usually starts with mass and then one visits the graves of family and friends that have passed to a better place. We have traditional food served on the day most famous are the "dead men's bones" This may sound creepy but I can assure you that these little fellows are very tasty! made out of pastry and almonds, then covered in white icing!.
                                                                               .....YUMMMMY!!!  

 "dead men’s bones"

These different almond cookies or almond fingers are pretty hard to describe, because they don't look like your usual cookies.
On the 1st and 2nd of November, the island  people celebrate the feasts of All saints and All souls.

This is a time to remember the loved ones who have now passed away. This remembering goes on throughout the whole of November.
A cute but creepy sounding islanders tradition is to bake dead man's bones during this time. 

Although creepy sounding, these are nothing but yummy pastries :) These cookies or almond fingers are basically little bone-shaped pastries filled with ground almonds.

Ingredients
(For the pastry)

160 grms (or 5.64 oz) sugar

240 grms (or 8.46 oz) margarine

480 grms (or 1 lb and 0.93 oz) flour

2 eggs (whisked)

1 teaspoon baking powder

One fourth of a teaspoon Vanilla essence

1 lemon rind

______________

(For the filling)

200 grms (or 7.05 oz) ground almonds

200 grms (or 7.05 oz) sugar

2 egg whites

Vanilla Essence

1 lemon rind

_______________________

(For the decorating)

200 grms (or 7.05 oz) icing sugar

Water

How to make the pastry
Mix the margarine with the sugar in a bowl, until the sugar melts. Add the eggs and the vanilla essence. Combine the baking powder and the lemon rind and add to the mixture, bit by bit. Mix well to form a pastry dough.
How to prepare the filling
Mix the ground almonds, sugar and lemon rind. Whisk the egg whites and add the vanilla essence. Combine and mix this with the almonds, sugar and lemon rind mixture.
How to make the "bones"
Roll out the pastry thinly and cut out several 15 cms X 10.5 cms rectangles.
Take spoonfuls of the almond filling and place down the middle of the pastry rectangles. Dampen the edges with water. Roll the pastry and form into wide strips. Close the edges and shape the edges (or try to) into legs bones! :) This is where the name of this recipe comes from. The cookies should end up looking like legs bones.

Baking Procedure
Put a baking sheet in the baking tray and place the “bones” in the tray. Do not put them too close to each other. Bake in a moderate oven for some 15 to 20 minutes.
Leave to cool before you decorate with icing sugar.

Decorating the Dead Men’s Bones

Melt the icing sugar in some water. (The texture has to be a bit thick.) Spread and paste the mixture on top of the bones.

Thanks for those who read this (Time post) hope you liked it and that you liked the tons of Images I uploaded and shared with you , But now Back to normality! I have shared a traditional dessert with you hope you like it!  

Here is one of the games my friends and I played on the night! 

Will you try and guess who killed count Dracula? 

Go on read and solve the mystery!! 

The Murder

Count Vaccula is dead!

He has been found lying in his coffin stake driven right through the heart, his favourite cow mooing in distress by his side.

Has his dark past finally caught up with him just when he had changed his evil ways, eating habits and name?!

Oh no!

This is no ordinary case of angry mobs of Transylvanian villagers marching with torches up to the dark and dreary castle!

The clues point to something more sinister....

What was Halloween Land Candy doing in the Count’s pockets?

Who had prepared him a sumptuous dinner of clotted cream, which the Count had not even finished?!

Who was the younger vampire seen leaving the castle in a fit of anger just before the breaking dawn?

And was that wolf fur found all over his cloak?

The plot thickens!

The Victim

Count Dracula had finally seen the light!

Well....artificial light...

With the increase of blood borne diseases the Count has seen the error of his ways!

His (immortal) life was not worth taking the risks any more just for a few drops of blood, and besides, after a few hundred years, the leg work and stalking was taking quite a toll on his knees.

In search of a new food source the count discovered a wondrous white creamy substance obtained from a strange yet gentle and somewhat smelly beast.

The villagers called it

MILK!

The Count could not get enough of it!

He quickly set out to revamp his Transylvanian estate.

The wooden poles once used to impale his enemies where quickly substituted by pastures.

He set out to fill every square inch around his castle with cows to provide him with fresh milk every hour of the night.

To show that he had indeed changed, the Count had his family name legally changed to Vaccula!

The signs leading to his castle were also painted over with Hempel paint so that they now read:

“This way to Milkvania”

The Suspects

An autopsy was carried out and blood samples taken from the Count himself revealed that he had taken a heavy doze of Deadly Nightshade some time during the night.

But was this so unusual?

The Count had always had trouble sleeping after all!

Unfortunately an accurate time of death could not be established...

He had been Master of the Walking Dead for a few hundred years before this faithful night!

After some more investigations, various witness accounts and a whole series of forensic tests, Scotland Graveyard detectives were finally able to narrow down the list of suspects to 4 shady individuals.

Jack Skellington

Cat Woman

Little Red Ridding Hood

...and...

Viscount Ramin Mangia-on...and on and on!!!

But what motive could they possibly have?

And how could all 4 individuals be placed at the scene of the crime?

Dare you untangle this web of mystery and unmask the true identity of the murderer?

Jack Skellington

The Pumpkin King is loosing his popularity!

He won the Halloween Elections just by the width of a thread

....from a spider’s web!

There’s no guessing who his arch nemesis in all this was....

Count Dracula!

Thanks to the success of the Twighlight Saga, the world of humans has recently been more receptive towards the idea of vampires, as crazy teenagers all around the world stare dreamy eyed at every effigy of Edward Cullen!

This caused the Election Scales in Halloween Land to tip in favour of the Count. It was only at the last minute that Jack managed to snatch his victory and earned the right to open the celebrations on Halloween Night!

He still had to repay Miss Lee and Mr. Manson for their very valuable contribution to his campaign!

But just when he had thought that the worst was over,

Sally refused to be his Halloween Queen!

Later, after the opening ceremony on Halloween Night had ended, he found her ogling over the TV at the Salvatore Brothers!

So enraged and saddened was he by this that he spent the rest of his special night alone, reading “50 Shades of Graves”, desperately hoping that he would find the magical spell that would bring him back his Sally

But could he really compete against the Count, win back Sally and keep his title of Pumpkin King for yet another year?

Jack feared that his boyish charm and class would not be enough!

Talented though he may be

Jack did not want to take any chances...

With his pockets stuffed full of candy he put on his top hat and left without saying a word to anyone!

Little Red Ridding Hood

Little Red is in financial trouble!

With less endorsement being offered to Little Red to appear on the cover of the latest fairy tale book or to grace the lid of some lucky 10-year-old’s lunch box, it has become harder for her to keep up with Fairy Tale Land’s life style for the rich and famous.

With Grandma now unable to manage her affairs due to ill health (the poor dear was never the same after she started hiding in wardrobes and hallucinating about wolves in drag trying to gobble her up whole) Little Red was handed down the deeds to Grandma’s cottage (or luxury chalet) in the Swiss Alps and became the executive director of Granny’s Swiss Chocolaterie!

Things had started to finally look up...

That is until this Vampire craze came along!

“If only they could all die out...just like the Dodo”, thought Little Red as she sat on her favourite fur rug in front of the fire with a goblet of hot cocoa in hand.

As dark shadows danced across the room from the flickering flames, she noticed that the cleaning lady had failed to clean the rug properly last time and the red splatters shone brightly against the silvery fur.

It was then that an idea crossed her mind....

Perhaps, there was a way out of all this!

Little Red put on her best red velvet cape and set off to Milkvania!

Cat Woman

Cat Woman was jealous!

But not just jealous...she was as green as a goblin with jealousy!

What was Little Red doing at the castle in the middle of the night?

What had she and Count Vaccula been talking about all night?

His dinner was getting sour!

And she had gone to such great lengths to prepare it for him!

“Business”, the Count had said, last time she had came over; the girl was simply trying to get rid of a few cows from the Chocolaterie!

Rubbish.....

Everyone knew that Little Red had already signed off her Gran’s chocolate factory to Willy Wonka Enterprises!

Cat woman was sure that the Count was up to his old tricks!

And she, the silly fool, had actually believed that he had changed!

They had so much in common...the midnight strolls and the romantic candle lit milk suppers, she had believed that he was the one!

But as an old Transylvanian saying went...

A vampire may lose his fangs but not his vices!

With an angry hiss, she stormed out of the castle and went in search of something long and pointy to sharpen her claws against, leaving the Count to finish his dinner alone.

Viscount Ramin Mangia-on

Viscount Ramin Mangia-on is a young vampire with impressing political prowess...or so he likes to think....

His latest aspiration was to have a “Bill of Vampirical Rights” presented to the Transylvanian Parliament.

The Bill of Rights would aim to protect vampires all over the world by abolishing the use of garlic, silver implements, wooden stakes and sunshine snacks in public places after sun down!

The support of another popular, powerful, and preferably rich, vampire would surely get his bill right on the Prime Minister’s desk!

Viscount Ramin knew just the right vampire for the job!

But all did not go as Mangia-on had planned!

The Great Count Dracula just wasn’t interested!

And even if he was... he had not yet forgotten that, at the last blood bath the count had hosted at his castle a few years ago, the young Viscount had complained about every single victim served to him!

One had too much cholesterol, the other was too anemic and he just could not digest common clotty O Negative! Why hadn’t the Count presented a delicate, young AB Negative to his guests?

Having his carefully selected choices so heavily criticized in front of his guests was an insufferable offence to Count Dracula, Master and Father of all Vampires, Prince of Darkness, etc etc...

He would never forgive Viscount Ramin for this!

He adamantly refused to back up Ramin’s political campaign and sent him out of this castle without as much as a penny to support a miniature flyer on a match stick!

Viscount Ramin, left the castle in a fit of anger!

The old fool! How dare he laugh at him and his ideologies!

But he would get his way in the end!

The Viscount always did!

pictures by Hotei