So, the idea here is: zombies crawling from their graves. It didn’t completely work out that way… but the results have a lot of potential and are still delicious so we’re considering this a success!

Materials include:

• Cupcakes. Just buy a box and follow the recipe.
• Chocolate Frosting.
• Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies.
• Some green melting chocolate.
• Some decorations or icing pens or whatever you like.

First bake your cupcakes and frost them. These are the “Graves” that your zombies will be bursting forth from. If you have the option, larger cupcakes are likely better; we found ours a bit small to work with. Then melt your chocolate in a microwave or double boiler, whichever you prefer. Now you’re going to coat your cookies. We screwed this up royally, then hit upon a much better solution.

At first our plan was to dip the cookies into the chocolate halfway, decorate then stuff the un-dipped end into the cupcake. Of course, as you might imagine, all this did was spilt the cupcake down the middle. Instead we evolved to just dunking the whole cookie into the chocolate. Use a fork to lift it out and let it dry on a rack. This will prevent the chocolate from puddling. After the chocolate dries, just cut the cookie in half to get two short zombies, or just cut a third off to get tall zombies and a lot of tasty cookie butts that can be eaten immediately.

Decorate the zombies however you like. We inserted candy eyes and mouths while the chocolate was still warm and used cake decorating pens for the details. Once the chocolate is cool and solid, you can stick your new zombies on their graves: the icing enough to hold them in place.

Using a sheet-cake instead of cupcakes is also an option. Note that if you use white chocolate (perhaps made a little grey) the same technique can be used to make excellent looking grave stones.

Our second movie, “Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead“, was amazingly good. I mean (and don’t say this lightly) “Shaun of the Dead” level of  laugh out loud funny. It is a different kind of humor. Where “Shaun” might make you laugh when Ed purposefully trashes the car, this makes you laugh when our hero accidently disembowels a little kid. If “Shaun” was dark humor, then this is the blackest of the black, but oh so good.

Our next movie, were predicting, won’t fair as well. “Zombie Hunter” does star Danny Trejo, the hardest working man in show business, but it just isn’t giving off that “instant classic” vibe. It’s probably not fair to compare them.

We’re also planning on playing some Zombie Dice while some things are set up for dinner. Not that we’re really all that hungry, we’ve already got way too much food. We did many of our favorites: Crafty Zombie Eyeballs, Brain Jello (although we just did simple jello this year) and Crafty Zombie Cookies. Yes, we may have gone just a little overboard.

The first movie, “Dead Season“, wasn’t too bad. A little more serious that we usually choose to kick things off, but definitely worth taking a look at. It focused more on survival in a world of the dead, rather than the dead themselves.

Up next we have a nice surprise, but after that, we’ll be doing “Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead“, the sequel to the amazing, fun “Dead Snow“.

The first “BE” in BEBE is “Boiled Eggs” because man cannot not-live on brains alone!  We pulled out the now utterly broken Dudley’s Spin an Egg. It doesn’t spin anymore, but it is the right size and you can get up some speed by hand so it’s still the best option for zombie eggs. We first soaked them in regular old vinegar-and-food coloring dye to get a base coat. Then we used the spinner and undiluted food-coloring to get those dark, vibrant colors.

The baskets were light this year, but the kids are taller than us: the only reason they’re getting baskets at all is because my lovely bride is a creature of habit. We, of course, ordered some Platter’s Chocolate. It’s hands down the best ever and as long as we can afford it, we’re having it shipped in. Still no zombies from Platter’s, but we’ve got fingers crossed for next year.

Tucked in the corners were some of their favorite candy and a few other goodies. Steve Jackson Games were well represented with the third expansion for Zombie Dice and a couple of expansion packs for the amazingly fun Munchkin Zombies.  Greg Stone’s zombie books, Zombies Hate Stuff and Zombies Have Issues and some cool zombie T-shirts from Mountain rounded things out.

Sure, you may call this a bribe to guilt two sullen teenagers into spending some time with the rest of their family but… well, you’d be exactly right.

We’re kicking off Boiled Eggs and Brain Eaters 2015 (tag: BEBE 2015)!  As usual, we got a late start, but that’s one of the benefits – maybe the only one? – of creating your own holiday: you decide when it starts. In our case that’s promptly at “whenever the hell we like.”

Although our kids are too old for Easter baskets, our kids get Easter baskets and we’ll have more on that later. It’s just one of the manifold ways in which they are spoiled terribly rotten. As usual when they are unreasonably forced to spend more than 15 minutes with the rest of the family they are sullen and grumpy. Teenagers.

We’re starting off with a movie that I’ve heard good things about: “Dead Season“. Apparently it tries some new things with the genre and that’s always a plus. We’ve got a few others selected and, as always, will be making way too much to eat. We’ll be posting activities and mini-reviews throughout the day.  We”ll do full-length reviews of everything in the coming weeks, but for today, posts will be short so we can get back to the fun.

The sixth year of Boiled Eggs and Brain Eaters, BEBE 2015 is only seven days away!

This will be a nice, quiet relaxing year for us. We don’t have anything significant planned and are just planning on enjoying a lazy day of over-eating, watching some movies and playing a game or two.

If you have any move or game suggestions for us, or are doing your own zombie stuff, let us know!