Real Food for Healthy Kids

Alien Head Cookies
Pinch off 1-inch balls of the Simply Splendid Sugar Cookie dough and roll between your palms to shape into 2-inch logs. Arrange 2 inches apart on cookie sheets. Pat down slightly and then, using your finger, make 2 indentations in a row in each cookie. Bake  in upper and lower thirds in a 350 oven for 8 minutes; transfer the cookie sheets to a work surface and reshape the indentations in each cookie using the rounded end of a wooden spoon handle. Reverse the sheets in the oven and bake until lightly golden, 10 to 12 minutes more.  Spoon melted seedless blackberry jam (or another flavor) into each eye socket.

Scarily Good Cupcakes

Use you imagination to make scary cupcakes for Halloween using a minimum of candies. You can also get tons of ideas from cookbooks, like Real Food for Healthy Kids, magazines, and other web sites. The most important thing is to make the base of your cupcakes from scratch, so you know what’s in them. We recently made a batch of our Bunny Bliss Carrot Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting for when we went on Martha Stewart’s radio show. We used naturally flavored jellybeans and candy-coated sunflower seeds and chocolate candies.

Adding an edge of colored sugar is a simple way to dress-up plain cupcakes. To decorate cupcakes with colored sugar edges: Pour about a half-cup of decorating sugar in a medium bowl with an angled bottom. Tilt the bowl and then roll the upper edge of an iced cup cake around in the sugar. You can also use candied-coated sunflower seeds. (Note: Look for colored sugar and food coloring made with vegetable dyes instead of artificial coloring.)