Eat your own coffin

Quick one today. I'm home from Atlanta, where one of our nieces got married to a good dude. I nearly had a hip disaster on the dance floor at the reception. More on that later. Today I need to tell you how to do something for Halloween. I saw Martha Stewart do this once.

I have a lot of cookie cutters in different shapes. One of those shapes is a coffin because death is coming for us all. While you wait for the hand of the reaper to claim you, you can make brownies. Here's how.

Get a boxed brownie mix. I will make a cake from scratch. Cookies from scratch. Everything from scratch. Brownies? No one has improved on the box mix. Don't bother trying.

Buy yourself a coffin-shaped cutter or just use a ruler and draw a template and cut with a knife.

Make the brownies, let them cool. Cut them into the shape. Then you decorate with some chocolate frosting. If you've got a boner for making at least part of this from scratch you can do that. My favorite recipe for chocolate frosting comes from Maida Heatter and here it is. (scroll down to the icing portion and don't panic that it involves boiling stuff and then an ice bath - you can do it because I can do it and I'm a complete idiot) Or you can make your life easier and just use the chocolate fudge frosting from a can.

Then you get one of those little tubes of white icing and you write R.I.P. and then the names of whoever's coming over to eat the brownies. They get to taste their own demise. Everyone's happy.

NOTE: that pic above is from my Instagram account, from a few years back, taken in the middle of the process, so there was no decorative doom-embellishment yet, use your imagination