Cooking for Halloween: Fun Ideas for Making Scary Food

Oct 152011

There is nothing quite as much fun as cooking for a Halloween party. For once you want your guests to feel slightly squeamish as they tuck into ‘eye balls’, ‘worms’ and ‘bat brains’ washed down with some nice warm ‘blood’. For a stress-free Halloween party think about using a catering business to prepare the food, leaving you to concentrate on decorating your house and thinking up party games to get the fun rolling.

creative halloween food

Halloween cooking is all about presentation, so make sure the table is decorated with cobwebs, candles and the odd plastic severed hand – easily found in the supermarkets’ seasonal section. Then let your imagination run riot by adding a spooky twist to some classic recipes. Put the finger into finger food by wrapping flour tortillas around slices of red pepper (to form the nail) and serve with a selection of dips with creepy names such as ‘swamp dregs’ (guacamole), ‘intestines’ (salsa) and ‘cream of bat brains’ (houmous).

creative halloween food

Green soups such as pea and ham or watercress served up in an iron cauldron set the tone for a great evening ahead. Black pudding also makes a great starter, served with goats cheese and salad leaves and the odd black olive or two (‘dead beetles’).

creative halloween food

Accompany your dinner with red wine and call it blood – better still, slightly warm the wine to give it a more authentic temperature! A Halloween punch can easily be made by substituting the orange juice for cranberry juice to give it a more sinister appearance. Green cocktails can be renamed ‘witch’s ruin’ or similar.

creative halloween food

A warming casserole or stew is a great way to take advantage of the lovely pumpkins and squashes available at this time of year. Add chunks of lamb, potatoes, carrots and parsnips for a hearty dish and serve in scooped out pumpkin shells. Don’t forget to tell your guests that the lamb is really the bits left over after you disemboweled your latest victim!

creative halloween food

Take some mozzarella balls and push in some black olives to form ‘eye balls’ then add them to pasta served in a rich tomato sauce to create a stomach churning (but delicious) dish. Make sure you include plenty of garlic to keep away the vampires!

For the kids, decorate a basic cheese and tomato pizza with green and red peppers and chunks of butternut squash to look like a Halloween lantern.

For a tasty dessert, bake apples stuffed with cinnamon, ginger and dried fruit. Serve with toffee ice-cream for dessert. Then serve cheese on a slate slab (tombstone) and make sure you add a few cobwebs and spiders for decoration.

creative halloween food

Tasty biscuits can be made by following a basic gingerbread recipe and then using Halloween cutters to create ghosts, witches hats and spiders’ bodies. Add some black food colouring to the icing to decorate and use liquorice laces to make the spider legs. Traditional chocolate cup cakes can also be decorated with jelly sweets that look like worms or again use black icing to give them a gothic twist.

creative halloween food