VeganMoFo IV: Never Trust a Pig Farm and a Smile

Happy World Vegan Day!!!!  Another VeganMoFo has begun!  I am super duper excited this time around because I will finally be doing video!  Now, everybody can see my stupid face and hear my voice.  Awesome!

As the season of vegan blogging begins, I'm already feeling frazzled.  I'm currently typing on three hours of sleep.  Anybody who tells you that building a gingerbread house is fun...they're lying.  Or maybe they just employed child labor.  Seeing as how my dogs don't have opposable thumbs, I spent way too many hours building a gingerbread barn by myself.  The fun part is definitely decorating.  The not-so-fun part is all the royal icing and waiting for things to dry.

This, my friends, is my last year doing gingerbread of any kind.  It's just too much work.  But this is definitely my favorite one yet.  Why?  Molding marzipan detached limbs is just as fun as it sounds.  So I present to you...Haunted Gingerbread 2010: Serial Killer Pig Farm.

front of barn, back of barn

side of house, marzipan pig, jack-o-lantern dots, front door

To make the house,  I used the PPK gingerbread recipe.  I got the template from Ultimate Gingerbread.  The house is sitting on a chocolate cake (from Papa Tofu) and I used the same frosting as last year.  For decoration I used black Twizzlers, Dots, Sweet Tarts, pretzels, colored coconut, and marzipan.  I think my favorite part was shaping the little piggies of death!  I have never worked with marzipan before but it's really so much fun.  Now, for close ups of the carnage.  I even carved little fingers and toes into the dismembered body parts.  Isn't it fun to take a cute concept and make it completely morbid?!  Haha.

tons of gore

don't trust these pigs at all

I can has HANDburger?

In my best Cryptkeeper voice: Well, that's all for now, kiddies!  See you tomorrow, boys and ghouls.  Bahahahahahahahaha.

Vegan MoFo III: Halloween Haunts

Happy Halloween, Y'all!  I would first like to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed this month of vegan blogging.  I have a gazillion recipes to try and have made a few new e-friends along the way!  I have never felt so a part of a community before.  It feels great.

The end of Vegan MoFo feels a lot like what I imagine the end of summer camp to feel like.  Sad but memorable.  It's a bittersweet relief that I won't have to run home and construct a meal every single day, but I am happy my blogging spirit has been revived.  This MoFo feels so much better than last year.  I made all 31 days.  I stretched myself pretty far and am seriously considering a zine on cheap vegan party ideas.  Thanks for the suggestion!  I don't remember who said it (so long ago), but I like that idea.

So, a couple of years ago I made a graveyard cake for the poetry slam.  I had Sour Patch Kid zombies ripping the guts out of Gummi Bears.  Then, for Christmas I made a gingerbread house for my office.  It was on top of gingerbread cake with a lemon buttercream.  That was great.  Not so great: I got a flat on the way to work and the house pretty much collapsed.  They ate it anyway, though.

Today, I decided to combine the two and make a haunted gingerbread house.  I should have known this would end badly.  As I went to take the house parts out of the freezer, one of the walls fell to the ground and shattered.  Noooooo!  Luckily, I picked a template that had two parts to it.  So I used one of the bigger walls to create the back wall, but it was too soft.  So basically, I made a gingerbread...shack?  I dunno.  Hee hee.  Alls I know is that I'm gonna eat the shizz outta this!

The shack on haunted hill!  Here we have a pretzel fence and sunflower seed path leading up to the shack house.  I used oreo crumbs for dirt, pretzel impaled dots for trees, and chick-o-stick ballz for bushes.  There's black licorice on the roof and the entire thing is bordered with candy corn flavored dots (ZOMG!) and black crows.

What I really wanted to do was a pig farm.  A really creepy serial killer type thing with marzipan pigs feasting on the flesh of the dead.  Muahahahaha.  Ha.

I couldn't get a good picture of this, but there was water with Swedish Fish piranhas eating Sour Patch Kids.  And tons of blood.  It's pretty hilarious. :)

Sour Patch Kids were so harmed in the making of this.  Pretzels are really good at impaling things.  There are also tombstones, but I couldn't find an edible ink pen.  I'm just gonna call them unmarked graves.

Okay.  The components of the thing...  I made a 9x13 chocolate cake from Papa Tofu.  On top of that I set a gingerbread cake.  They were frosted with this chocolate frosting recipe.  Half of the chocolate cake was covered with VCTOTW Fluffy Buttercream (half recipe, dyed blue).  For the gingerbread, I used the PPK recipe.  That's all she wrote.

Farewell, Vegan MoFo!  I'll see you next year!  I still have a ridiculous amount of blogs to read so I hope everybody has a safe and happy halloween!