Like many kids, ours love to dress up for Halloween. This year, after brain-storming lots of ideas, they announced that they wanted to have zombie skin that they could pull off and eat, announcing that this would gross people out - they were not wrong! This tutorial, believe it or not, is super easy and healthy, despite how it may look.
To make our revolting edible fruit scabs we simply adapted our recipe for Fruit Leather. Making fruit leathers at home is really easy, they make a fabulous healthy snack and kids love them. We used both a simple apple puree, and an apple and plum puree (which we lightly blitzed). We split the plain apple puree into three, leaving one plain, and colouring the other two yellow and green respectively, with food colour gels. The apple and plum puree got split in half, and we added a few blackberries to one half and mashed it up a little.
Once we were happy with the colour and texture of our puree, we spooned it out on to a baking tray lined with cling film, into how we imagined zombie scabs might look. As the scabs dry out they will shrink back so bear that in mind when you spoon the puree out.
We then popped our scabs into the bottom of the Aga to dry out. If using an oven, set it on the lowest possible setting, you are aiming to dry the scabs out, not cook them. You can also leave your tray in a warm place to dry out naturally. In the Aga, the scabs took about 2 hours to dry out. We were absolutely delighted by how revolting our finished scabs looked!
To complement our scabs, we made edible blood and pus to dress them with. We mixed golden syrup with a little water, added yellow and green food colouring to one, and red food colouring with a little coca powder to the other, and gave them both a good stir.
Fruit leather is naturally tacky to touch, so it did seem to sit on the skin quite happily. We wanted to make sure our scabs stayed in place, so we used edible glue to hold ours - which stuck them down really well. The kids love their edible fruit scabs, and delight in peeling them off and eating them in front of anyone who might find it disgusting - which it turns out, is pretty much everyone.
This post first appeared on the Craft Invaders blog, where you will find all our original craft tutorials, as well as more images of our Revolting Edible Scabs being tested out by the kids.