31 Days of Halloween: Day 14

For day fourteen of my 31 Days of Halloween, I am posting a guide to throwing a fun Halloween party. I love themed parties and Halloween is always so much fun because it is a theme in itself. I got the chance to help my friend throw a Halloween party last year and I had so much fun planning it! Aside from the basics: a theme, location, date and time, the most important components to planning a party are food, drinks and decorations.

Snacks:
For a Halloween themed party, there are tons of ways to get creative with snacks. I recommend picking a few options and sticking to those. After browsing the internet for ideas, I decided on a few that I thought would be simple to make, Halloween themed and of course taste delicious! First and foremost, I knew I wanted to do some kind of cupcake. Cupcakes are always fun and can easily be decorated to match any theme. While there were a ton of cute ideas, I though orange and black funfetti would be simple. I was only able to find the Halloween funfetti icing, not the mix, so I used devil's food cake mix with the icing. I also was able to find cute cupcake liners that said Boo and party picks with the word "Boo" and ghosts on them.

Next I found a cute recipe for Halloween treats which were made of pretzels, Hershey's hugs and candy corn. Click on the link to get the super simple recipe. These are yummy and look great on display!

After a couple sweet choices, I wanted to have something that falls more in the salty category. I was excited to find a cute idea for Spider Web 7-layer dip. You basically make the sour cream look like a spider web on top of the dip and place a fake spider in the middle. My spider web didn't quite turn out how I planned, I cut the zip lock baggie to wide so I didn't pipe it right but with the fake spider it still got the point across!

An extra snack I added that wasn't in my original plan was the pirate booty. I knew there were going to be a few pirates at the party so I thought it would be a fun addition.

Drinks:
Now we titled the party "Bring Your Own Boos" because I saw it on a napkin and thought it was a cute play on words. It's good to feature a signature punch and maybe some beer and jello shots but it's always good to encourage guests to "bring their own boos" as well so you make sure you don't run out of alcohol! The title also encouraged everyone to bring their own "spookiness" to the party with their costumes!

For a signature punch at a Halloween party, something red or green is best. I know that makes it sound like a Christmas party but let me explain. Red gives the concept of something bloody or gory which is perfect. Green is like a witches brew which is also cool. You can also find orange or black drink recipes for just Halloween colors. I decided to go for red, I found a recipe that was ginger ale, cranberry juice and apple juice. I just added vodka to make it grown up. My original plan was to try and freeze a hand which looks cool in a red punch but I tried freezing it in gloves and ended up breaking the fingers trying to cut the glove off around it. I may have used the wrong kind of glove but I ended up just dumping skull, pumpkin, fingers and bones ice cubes in there which quickly melted but looked cool for a minute. Instead of a signature punch you could also feature a signature cocktail. Again, tons of ideas on the internet for Halloween cocktails.

Jello shots are always fun to have at parties as well. Orange jello is the most Halloween-y option unless you want to go for red again for blood. My first thought was doing orange jello and some sort of black rum or black vodka to get the whole orange and black look but then it came to me: orange jello and Pinacle Whipped. If you haven't had it before, the combo of Pinacel Whipped and orange tastes like a creamsicle, yum! I also thought it'd be fun to add gummy worms in the jello shots for an extra themed look.

For beer, a hard cider or pumpkin beer is fun but those can get expensive. We didn't do this but I saw some cool inflatable coolers at Party City: pirate ship, skeleton and pumpkin or I saw online you can gut out a pumpkin and fill it with ice and use it as a cooler.

Decorations:
I definitely recommend checking out your local Dollar Store first when looking for party decorations. They actually have a ton of stuff and when shopping for a party things can add up quickly, even when they're just a dollar! I was able to get a couple skeleton garlands, spider webs, packs of plastic creepy crawlers (spiders, skeletons, bugs), orange and black streamers and balloons, Halloween bowls and trays and a cauldron, Halloween paper plates and napkins, plastic cups and skeleton, bat and pumpkin straws. I also later found body parts that grow in water and got 3 vases and displayed them at the party. From Party City I got two photo displays, a witch and a Frankenstein where you stick your head in the whole to take a picture. They were totally meant for little kids but I thought they were fun! I also used two bottles of Vampire wine as a decoration and were also available to drink but no one ended up opening them. Guess I have something to drink on actual Halloween night now! Next to the bottles I displayed 3 wine glasses I got that said "Spider Venom", "Witches Brew" and "Vampire Blood." Finally I made a centerpiece out of Halloween Candy that I thought looked really cute. It had ghost and pumpkin peeps, black and orange gumballs, marshmallows, candy corn and was topped with Halloween cookie pops.