Fire up the ovens and get ready to feast for Halloween with the best Halloween recipes. It is normal for everyone to be excited about the costumes and trick or treating, but without a Halloween feast, the holiday just wouldn’t seem the same.
If you trace the origins of Halloween back, you will find that the holiday came over with the original European settlers and it marks the height of the harvest in fall. Supposedly at this time, the veil between the living and the dead is thin enough for the spirits to pass over into our world and many dishes are inspired by this belief.
Some Of The Best Halloween Recipes
Some of our old favorites can be spruced up by adding a little bit of creative thinking and effort. Some of the snacks and meals are simple enough for the kids to lend a hand as well. Why not get the little ones involved? They will have a ton of fun and will also be able to give a lot of creative ideas as well.
Pumpkin Waste
Once you have hollowed out your pumpkin for the Jack-o-Lantern, you may be stuck with quite a bit of pumpkin flesh. You can only cook up so much pumpkin until you are sick of it, so here are a few ideas of how to disguise it:
- Bread and Pumpkin pudding – This is a little spicy spin on a favorite desert that is easy to make. When making your bread and butter pudding, add some of pumpkin chunks, brown sugar, ginger and cinnamon and bake as per normal. Serve with custard or a dollop of whipped cream.
- Pumpkin Pie – This is usually a favorite at Thanksgiving, but nothing stops you from making this delicious desert and giving it a twist of terror by saving some of the pie pastry and making little worms complete with segments and eyes and placing them on the pie just before it is done. To give the worms a bit of a browning, you can dab them with egg wash.
- Pumpkin fritters – you can use the same recipe that you do for your pumpkin pie, but make balls from the filling and squash them flat before deep-frying them. You can add a scary twist to them by making eyes out of molding icing and placing them on the fritters when serving them.
Malicious Meat
Meat is so versatile and sausage is so easy to mold into different shapes. All you need is a bit of imagination.
- Spaghetti and Eyeballs – An olive, wrapped in a meatball, wrapped in a potato fritter will make scary eyeballs for your spaghetti. Your family will love this scary variation if they can get themselves to eat it.
Spooky Side Dishes
- Sweet Peppers make a great smaller version of a pumpkin and once you take out all of the seeds, they have the perfect hollow to stuff. Carve faces out of them, cut around the top stalk, remove the seeds, stuff them, place the top stalk back and bake in the oven for a few minutes until they appear just slightly wrinkled.
- Bread can be boring, but it always makes a great side dish. Making creamed spinach and melting a bit of feta cheese into it makes a great stuffing for hollowed out bread. You can use a round bread loaf and hollow it out to make it look like the spinach stuffing is its brains.
Sneaky Snacks
As much fun as scary meals are to make, there is just so much more that you can do with snacks, creating the best Halloween recipes that can be carried down generations.
- Mummies – You can wrap hotdogs, asparagus, carrots or even breadsticks in Phyllo pastry and bake them until the pastry is just cooked, but not browned. Two peppercorns will do well as little eyes. You can attach these with a tiny blob of mayo or mustard.
- Rotten Toffee Apples – You can give your toffee apples a slightly more rotten look by grating off the bottom half of just the peel of the apple and letting the peels sundry. Once you have coated the apple itself in toffee, you can dip the bottom half of the apple in the dried apple peels to coat the naked part of the apple.
- Witchy Cupcakes – There is so much you can do with cupcakes to make your Halloween more festive. You can cover them in green icing and make witch hats for them from molding icing as well as a wicked little face.
- Cupcake spooks – You can make your cupcakes a little spooky covering with white molding icing. You can then make little eyes by coloring some of the icing with black food coloring and sticking them on.
- Ghostly Meringues – Kids love meringues and making them look like ghosts on Halloween will make them go crazy over them. Simply push two small raisins into the top of your meringues if they are nice and big, or two little chocolate balls into smaller ones before you bake them.
- Scary fingers – Use cookie dough and shape it into the shape of a finger. You can even score it with a sharp knife to look like wrinkles and then push a raisin into the front of the finger to look like a black fingernail.
- Spider cupcakes – Liquorice makes great spider legs. You can use other sweets as you please to make the fangs and eyes of the spider and put a nice big blob of icing in the middle of the cupcake for the body of the spider.
- Versatile eyeballs – You can use a cookie dough and add the right coloring to make eyeballs for just about any of your sweet treats from cupcakes to using them on their own for your guests to chew on. Use different color cookie dough for the different parts of the eye. You can use a very thin paintbrush or a toothpick to draw veins onto your eyeballs as well.
- Brandy-less balls – If you can get your hands on a recipe for brandy balls, you can substitute the brandy for a bit of milk and food coloring. These delicious treats can be used as the starting point for many treats and they can be made and used in different sizes depending on what you are using them for. You could, as an example, make a nice big ball the size of an ice-cream scoop and put an ice-cream cone on top of the ball to make a clown, a witch or a magician.
Making Everyday Items Look Scary
Food coloring can make anything that would usually seem like a usual meal look like something out of a horror movie. Beetroot is a great way to make anything look really red. The coloring in beetroot is all natural and the taste is neutral which means you can use it to color salty or sweet snacks. Just make sure that you do not overdo it with the red as it will overpower any other coloring that you may have used. Beetroot can even be used to color your drinks.
Jelly in different colors can be used to decorate your tables, can be used in other decorations, or can make the other desserts look more ghastly.
Treats That Your Kids Can Help With
Go down to your nearest bakery store and get cookie cutters in the shapes of your typical Halloween icons such as witches, cats, Jack-o-Lanterns or bats. They will have a ball cutting out their own Halloween shapes after you rolled out the cookie dough for them. Once you’ve taken the cookies out of the oven, they can decorate them with sweets and piping bags and all kind of edible pretty things. This project does come with a warning. To let kids loose in the kitchen when icing is involved, will mean that there will be a mess to clean up afterwards. They will have fun though and it doesn’t happen that often that they can help in the kitchen. Throw a plastic covering over all surfaces and you will have less to clean up afterwards.
Making sandwiches can also pique a child’s interest if you use biscuits instead of bread and all kinds of different icing instead of spreads. Let them make their own slimy sandwiches and decorate them with already prepared molded icing bats or eyeballs or whatever will hold their attention to the task at hand.
Decorating cupcakes is also a favorite activity for kids and it will get their created juices flowing. If your children are big enough to cut things our, they can cut out the shapes they need out of a sheet or rolled plastic icing. They will love the freedom of creativity that they will gain with being able to dictate exactly what they are making and how they are making it. If your children are a little smaller, they can always tell you which shapes they need or what they are planning to make and you can just help them by cutting out the shapes they need.
Getting Down To The Basics
Some of the basic recipes that you may need for Halloween happiness include the following:
Perfect Pie Crust Recipe
This Crust recipe can be used for savory tarts or sweet pies.
Tip: All pastry recipes always work best when kept chilled and if you use your hands as little as possible during the processing of the pastry.
You will need:
- 2 and Half cups of all-purpose flour (have an amount extra for rolling out the pastry)
- 1 cup cold unsalted butter which has been cut into half-inch cubes
- 1 Tsp Salt
- 1 Tsp Sugar
- 6 to 8 Tbsp iced water
You will then need to:
- Combine all of the dry ingredients, being the Flour, salt and sugar in a food processor until it is well mixed through.
- Add the butter gradually until your mixture looks like coarse meal or breadcrumbs.
- Add the iced water one tablespoon at a time and pulse the mixture until it begins to clump together. Don’t add more water once the crumbs start to stick together or your crust will be too tough
- You are now ready to roll the dough out on a clean surface. Once it is the size and thickness you want without overworking the dough you can sprinkle the extra flower lightly over each disc, and wrap them separately in plastic wrap.
- Refrigerate for and 1 hour before using.
This recipe and other recipes can be found here.
Brandy Balls
You can either leave the brandy in the recipe or you can substitute for rum or cream-based liquor as well. To make an alcohol-free version, the brandy can be substituted for a bit of milk to add the necessary moisture to the mixture.
You will need:
- 1 can evaporated milk (about 5 ounces)
- 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
- Half a cup brandy
- 1 packet vanilla wafers (16 Ounces) that have be crushed very fine
- 2 cups finely chopped walnuts
- 1 cup confectioners’ sugar for rolling
You will then need to:
- Melt the evaporated milk and the chocolate chips while stirring until the mixture is smooth. This can be done in the microwave or in a metal bowl on the stovetop
- Remove from heat
- Stir in the crushed wafers and brandy and stir well
- Roll the dough into the desired sized balls and roll in walnuts and then the confectioners’ sugar.
- Store covered in the fridge until needed.
This recipe and other similar recipes can be found here.
Making A Feast To Remember
When this time of the year comes, you will be eager make the best Halloween recipes for the big feast. But before you spend thousands of dollars on buying treats and baking up a storm in the kitchen, you should sit down and draw up a menu so that you know how much of which meal or snacks you will need. This will not only prevent you from having too much food leftover and wasted, but it will also ensure that you do not have a shortage which will leave your guests disappointed.