Spiders & Easy Pumpkin Spice Play-Doh

Just a couple more days until Halloween, and while we are still battling illness over here, things are starting to look up. We missed our Birth to Five group's Halloween Harvest this year, but we WILL be trick or treating! Now I just need to get out of my funk completely and bake some delicious goodies for Wednesday! If only I could taste something.. sigh.. Here's hoping. In the meantime, we did a fun spider theme lunch, and a lazy easy version of pumpkin spice Play-Doh.

Roast beef & cream cheese on a bagel thin, Colby Jack cheese, red grapes, carrots, cherry tomatoes, ranch, and chocolate spiderweb & spider.

The chocolates we added to this lunch were based on a fantastic post by Cute Food for Kids. We were already making chocolates for Halloween, so we used the extra melted stuff to pipe out a bunch of fun bugs.. you'll see a few more in later lunches, I'm sure. Rather than chips, we used Merckens wafers, which are delicious. Then, we use the plastic squeeze bottles to fill or pipe. It was so easy, and they turned out pretty cute. Speaking of easy, we totally took a short cut making our pumpkin spice play-doh, but it turned out great!

I know there is a fantastic recipe for making homemade pumpkin playdough using flour, salt, cream of tartar, oil, pumpkin pie spice, food coloring, and water, plus some cooking and kneading. But.. I had some orange Play-Doh already, so we just kneaded in a hearty portion of pumpkin pie spice, and we had a super fast and simple version of this deliciously scented dough.

In this lunch...