Preparing spooky Halloween dinners and treats is one of the best ways to have fun in the kitchen. Not only does it spark creativity, but it’s also an excuse to satisfy our sweet (and sometimes salty!) tooth. Whether you want a nourishing dinner to fortify your little ghosts before trick-or-treating, or need a great dessert for a ghoulish party – or even a creative way to use up leftover candy – these 17 Halloween Recipes That Are Horribly Good.
The Ultimate 4 Tier Candy Filled Halloween Ice Cream Cake
Maybe you buy your candy in bulk and have way too much left over after the holidays. Maybe you’re throwing a Halloween party and need a show to feed a crowd. Or maybe you just feel gluttonous. Enter the Four-Tier Halloween Candy Ice Cream Cake!
Witch’s Finger Shortbread Cookies with Raspberry Jam
If you prefer the gory side of Halloween, these shortbread cookies are for you. They’re shaped like severed gnarled fingers, which makes them pretty gross at first. But the real kicker comes when you bite into them and they start to “bleed” a raspberry jam filling.
Ghost and Spider Skillet Pizza
Sometimes making a Halloween dish is as simple as adding spooky decorations to a regular recipe. Here it means starting with our foolproof pan pizza and top it with cut-outs of mozzarella ghosts (with slivers of black olives for eyes) and black olive spiders pierced with rosemary needles for legs.
Vampire Mouth Marshmallow Sandwich Cookies
A cross between s’mores and those cheap plastic vampire teeth that appear at Halloween parties, these awesome sandwich cookies are homemade chocolate graham crackers, red icing “gums”, marshmallow “teeth” and slivered almond “fangs”. We use a tangy cream cheese frosting for the gummies, which cuts out the sweetness of marshmallows and graham crackers.
Homemade Caramel Apples
This recipe produces a caramel thick enough to generously coat the apple, but soft enough to bite into.
Homemade milk duds
As far as we’re concerned, there’s only one worthy candy at the movie theater concession stand: Milk Duds. It’s like your favorite candy, perfected.
Warm witch’s beer
Whether you take to the streets or stay home to pass out candy, try making a witch’s brew in your cauldron this Halloween. Made with equal parts pomegranate juice and cranberry juice, this deliciously dark (and alcohol-free) concoction is perfect for sipping between trips to the front door.
Black sesame ice cream
The secret to this moody-looking ice cream’s charcoal color and surprisingly nutty flavor lies in a Japanese-style black sesame paste. Replacing it with the products available on supermarket shelves simply won’t do the job. The paste is made from toasted, unshelled sesame seeds, which gives it a toasted and still slightly bitter flavor; we temper it here with a little brown sugar.
Pumpkin Cheddar Crackers
Sugar cookies are fun to make and decorate for any holiday, but as we’ve grown and our tastes have changed, we’re happy to apply our cookie cutters to a more flavorful recipe, like these chunky cookies , flaky and buttery. like crackers. This is a great recipe to make with your kids, who can go to town stamping pumpkin shapes; It’s probably best to leave the knife-cut ridges to an adult.
Chili-Chocolate Spider Cupcakes
Here we top green chocolate cupcakes with spicy ganache-based chocolate spiders, licorice string legs, slivered almond fangs and sour candy eyes. A small amount of chili flakes added to the ganache for the spider bodies gives just the right amount of heat to the cupcakes.
Roasted pumpkin soup with brown butter and thyme
This intensely flavored pumpkin soup is enhanced with browned butter and thyme.
Seafood ramen with squid ink, mussels and salmon roe
A bowl of ramen made with jet-black squid ink spaghetti, squishy mussels, and spooky orange salmon roe makes for a Halloween dish that’s pretty good to eat.
Pumpkin Spice Ice Cream
An extra-baking vanilla bean base is combined with pumpkin puree and flavored with cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, dark brown sugar and a small pinch of bourbon.
Devils on horseback
Here, an English pub snack is reinvented with Mexican ingredients: devils on horseback become Diablos a Caballo. A great snack for Halloween, or Dia de Los Muertos, or anytime an alcoholic beverage is on hand.
Mini Chocolate Cheesecakes
These spider web decorated cupcakes with a chocolate cheesecake base are the perfect treat for a Halloween party.
Pumpkin Bourbon Cider Milkshake
All the flavors of fall come together in this boozy milkshake. Don’t skip the maple whipped cream, it’s definitely worth it.
Chocolate-Covered Sweet Corn Layer Cake
Here, the butter soufflé cake is topped with buttercream and coated in chocolate ganache, making it the perfect, non-scary Halloween cake.
How to Make a Super Spooky Halloween Gingerbread House
If you’ve never made a gingerbread house before, there’s no time like Halloween. Not only is October a less chaotic time than the weeks leading up to Christmas, but haunted home is the most indulgent kind. Is the roof slightly crooked? Are the windows uneven? Did it crumble a little around the edges? Blame it on the ghosts! The flaws only add to its ramshackle charm.
