It’s October—time to get in the spirit of Halloween with the EZSound Box by Invite By Voice!

Similar to a holiday gingerbread house kit, you can now find edible haunted house kits at grocery and craft stores. I used the haunted gingerbread house kit from Trader Joe’s, along with the EZSound Box with an extension play button to give my edible creation an audible, spooky edge.

Use your smartphone’s voice recording app, your computer’s built-in microphone, or a USB microphone to record your own spooky sounds—capture your family moaning like ghosts, shrieking in terror, and laughing maniacally. Or download royalty-free/public domain Halloween music and sounds. The Free Music Archive has a nice selection of fun Halloween music on their website. Royalty Free Zone—No Copyright Music’s YouTube Channel has some good offerings too. At SoundBible.com, you can find royalty-free scary noises. Just be sure to review the website’s licensing rules—some just want credit if posted online or used in a commercially released movie, while others have regulations on what you can do with the track, such as edit it or play it during a for-profit event.

I had (a little too much?) fun adding my own spooky voice talents to horror-themed audio and music files and recording my haunted house soundtrack on the EZSound Box audio recorder and player. I used Boom Box Post’s Haunted House Soundtrack 2015 and added my own ghostly messages. It was really simple to transfer the finished file to the sound box—just follow the easy steps below or the detailed instructions included with the EZSound Box

Record Spooky Haunted House Sounds or Music on the Recordable Sound Box

1. Get your audio file ready on your device
2. Make sure your EZSound Box has batteries and is turned on
3. Plug the audio adapter (included with the EZSound Box) into the headphone jack on your computer, tablet, or smartphone
4. Plug the EZSound Box into the other end of the audio adapter
5. Press the record button on the front of the sound box (it will beep)
6. Right after you press record, press play on your audio file
7. Press the sound box record button again to stop recording (it will beep again)
8. Test your recording by pushing the play/stop button at the end of the blue wire on the EZSound Box

Horrifying Haunted Cookie and Gingerbread House Kits

Once your audio is ready, you can start building your Halloween gingerbread house. You can use any haunted cookie or gingerbread house kit with Invite By Voice’s EZSound Box, such as the Trader Joe’s Haunted House Chocolate Cookie Kit that I used, Wilton's Gingerbread House Kit - Build It Yourself Chocolate Cookie Halloween House Decorating Kit, Hyde and EEK! Boutique’s Chocolate Halloween Hyde Manor House, or Bee International’s Halloween Haunted Cookie House Kit (with pumpkin spice cookies).

If you’re a baker, you could also order R & M’s Haunted House Gingerbread Bake Set from Amazon.com and pick up your own Halloween-themed icings, frostings, and candy decorations. The R & M set only includes cookie cutters and detailed instructions, but you can reuse the set year after year. Hyde and EEK! Boutique products can be purchased at Target, and Wilton products can be found at Walmart, Wilton.com’s Halloween shop, Amazon.com, Michael’s, and JoAnn craft stores.

Trader Joe’s haunted house kit comes with:

• 6 chocolate, pre-cut cookie pieces to build the house
• 1 chocolate cookie ghost
• 1 premade pouch of chocolate-flavored black frosting
• 1 premade pouch of orange icing
• 4 different candies to embellish your house: bones, bats, jelly beans, and mini bead candies

Helpful Additional Items for Your Edible Halloween Haunted House Construction

I would also recommend buying extra frosting—building structures with cookies requires a lot of frosting to hold the walls and roof together, and I needed more than was provided in the kit. (On a side note, there is a difference between icing and frosting: icing tends to be thinner and glossier, while frosting is thick and somewhat fluffy. Frosting works better than icing as a cement for edible housing.)

You can easily make your own delicious black frosting by adding black food coloring to your favorite chocolate frosting. I used half a container of Wilton’s Chocolate Decorator Icing (it claims to be an icing with a stiff consistency, but it seems more like frosting to me), which is about 8 ounces/1 cup. Then I added 12 drops of Wilton’s Color Right black food coloring and mixed well.

I also picked up some white Wilton Cookie Icing for the ghost; this is completely optional. I was just being an over-achiever.

You’ll need a pair of scissors to cut the icing and frosting pouch tips. A toothpick and butter knife or frosting spreader also come in handy when you need to smooth out icing and frosting or scrape off a decorating mistake.

So here’s a list of additional materials and tools you may want to have on-hand before starting this project:

• Extra frosting (chocolate frosting and black food coloring)
• White cookie icing (optional)
• Frosting piping tools: ziplock bag or disposable piping bag for additional frosting
• Scissors
• Toothpick
• Butter knife/frosting spreader for additional frosting and design

Now that you have your supplies, it’s time to build and decorate your edible Halloween haunted house.

Step 1: Prepare the Frightening Frosting and Icing

Mix up your extra frosting and put it in your ziplock or piping bag (or keep it in the bowl if you’re using a butter knife or frosting spreader). For the icing and frosting that came with the Trader Joe’s Haunted House Cookie Kit, knead each pouch for 1 minute to soften for a smooth consistency. Remove the cap from the icing and frosting pouches and cut the tip off with scissors, making sure not to cut too far down (otherwise too much icing and frosting will come out when you’re piping).

Step 2: Decorate the Outer Walls with Eerie Embellishments and Dark Decor

I deviated from the recommended directions that came with the kit for step 2; instead of building the structure first and then decorating, I decorated the front, back, and side walls before assembling. Have you ever tried decorating with icing and frosting on a vertical object? Gravity can sometimes work against you. However, when you’re assembling the haunted house, you’ll want to make sure you hold the pieces together long enough for the frosting to set: at least 1-2 minutes. If you don’t, the walls could fall down, ruining your design—and angering the ghosts.

Use the included black frosting, orange icing, and candies to create windows, doors, and decorative accents. Frosting works best for securing the candies.

Step 3: Assemble the Haunted House

Follow the directions on the back of the kit on how to assemble the haunted cookie house walls and roof; start with the back panel, then attach the two side walls. Make sure to hold walls in place for at least a minute to let the frosting set.

Before securing the front house panel, place the EZSound Box inside the house, speaker side up, and pull the play/stop button out through one of the front corners of the house. Add more frosting along the edges of the house as needed to stabilize.

If you want to avoid putting the sound box inside the house, you can hide the speaker box behind the haunted house and run the blue extension wire under the house so that the button is in front of the house’s base. Or you can use the EZSound Box - Front Play Button  and simply hide it behind the house.

Once the walls are secure, follow the kit’s instructions on adding the roof.

Step 4: Decorate the Roof and Yard of Your Monstrous Manor

Finish the design by decorating the roof and yard with icing, frosting, and candies. If you have white frosting, spread it on the ghost and then use the black frosting pouch to add a face. Let set for several minutes. Secure to the base/ground with frosting in front of the EZSound Box play/stop button to hide it; it will still be accessible from behind the ghost. Due to the odd shape of the ghost cookie, it’s helpful to prop it against the house and then fortify the ghost’s base with additional frosting.

Step 5: Enjoy—If You Dare!

Press the play-back button whenever you need to induce some Halloween terror—or laughs, depending on how good you and your family are at voice acting. You’ll have so much fun with this project that you won’t want to tear the haunted house down to eat it!

Invite by Voice’s EZSound Box is a wonderful addition to haunted Halloween cookie and gingerbread houses. The sound box made my edible Halloween decoration really unique—I had the freedom to record my own Halloween message and get creative with the sound design (check out the video below). The only limit is your imagination. And with the generous 200 to 240 second re-recordable audio duration, I had plenty of time to fit a longer, spookier audio file on the sound box to freak out my friends and family this Halloween.

What spooky Halloween projects have you made with Invite By Voice’s EZSound Boxes?