Bone Soup Final Performance

For the past five years, I have read a wonderful Halloween story called Bone Soup by Cambria Evans to Pumpkinbutt's class for Halloween. 

 In the story, the town's folks make a huge cauldron of Bone Soup from ingredients such as imported eyeballs, bat wings, frog legs, and a sprinkling of slime and sludge.   I generally have plastic ingredients to place in the cauldron to make a fake soup as the story progresses. This year I decided to make everything edible and have a huge chocolate pudding cake in the cauldron!  They all would get to share and eat the 'soup' just like the story!

The 'Dry Old Bone' that starts the soup on it's way in the story ....  

I made this bone from white fondant and dusted it with cocoa powder.

The Bone Soup 'simmering'.

Close up:

I had the cauldron sitting on a 'fire with logs'.  The fire is a strand of flicker flame lights.  The logs are the props from our lumberjacking days.

After the story was read, everyone had a serving of the Bone Soup and Ghoul-Aid to sip on!

I loosely used a recipe I found in one of my Andy Griffith cookbooks for something called (How do you do) Mrs. Wiley's Punch Bowl Cake.  It is basically a cake that has been baked and broken up (wadded?) and put in a punch bowl with pudding and other things added in. I started out by baking 6 layers of chocolate cake and making 2 family sized boxes of chocolate pudding a day before the event.  I also gathered all the ingredients: Frog legs: gummy frogs; Imported eyes: candy corn m & ms; Bat wings:  made from Wilton Candy Apple candy melts and a bat mold; Dusting of slime and sludge: candy corn, gummy worms, Halloween sugar sprinkles. 

I came up with a great idea for having several layers of the cauldron cake all made and ready to serve by using my Picnic Pack.  It also fit perfectly into the cauldron.

This one shown is not mine but exactly the same, just so you get the idea.

It has five pans that separate and stack together.  The carrying handle can be removed too.  I use my Picnic Pack all the time.  It is great for carrying cupcakes in.

You may have wondered why so much cake and pudding.  Because I volunteered to be room parent for two class rooms....41 kids total.  PB has two teachers that are each responsible for a class.  No one signed up to be room parent for either teacher...so I did.

 Last Year, I said I wanted to up the ante for this performance: 41 kids, chocolate cake, pudding,  various Halloween craft projects!  Spooky...or insane?!