Cook Up Trouble

Unleash your inner creepy chef with Halloween dishes and drinks that are as gruesome as they are delicious!

Serve cheese fondue, hummus, or a sweet dip (like dulce de leche or pumpkin cream cheese dip) from a small hallowed-out pumpkin. If you’ve got steady hands you could even carve away just the outer skin of the pumpkin to make it into a jack-o-lantern.
Crunchy bones (or snakes) cut from puff pastry — Roll out a block of puff pastry dough and cut it into the shape of bones (and really exaggerate the shapes at the ends — we didn’t do that enough in the picture above, and they just looked like sticks) or twist them into vaguely snake-like shapes, with a rounded head at one end and a pointy tail at the other. Sprinkle with seasoning and bake. SO easy!
Mummy sausage rolls — Wrap strips of dough around a sausage, hot dog or chipolata and add dots of mustard or ketchup for eyes.
Jack-o-lantern risotto balls
Tortilla tombstones with guacamole
Mozzarella and olive eyeballs
Deviled monster/dragon/tarantula eggs — Add a little green food colouring to the filling and sprinkle with blood-red paprika or black sesame seeds. You can also add a little dark food colouring to the water while they’re cooking (we used black, but purple or blue would be good too). Once the eggs are cooked, gently roll them on a table to crackle the shells, then let them sit in the dyed water to stain the whites with gruesome hues.

We like to make something in advance that we can either reheat quickly or pull out of the slow-cooker when we get home from trick-or-treating.

Stuffed pepper jack-o-lanterns — Carve around the stem area and remove the seeds, then carve a face into the side of an orange pepper. Stuff with a mix of mince (veggie or meat), some sort of grain like bulgur/rice/kashi/quinoa, minced onions, shredded cheese and your favourite seasoning. Replace the lid and stand upright in a roasting dish. We bake them in a pool of seasoned passata and serve with black beans and cornbread.
Shrunken head roast potatoes — Carve rough holes for the eyes and mouth and cut vertical lines for the sides of the nose, the proceed with your regular roast potato recipe!
Severed finger rolls or worm dogs
Mini meatloaf ghosts
Spooky Halloween pizza
Monster sushi
Monster burgers
Skull pasty — Our lazy version involves rolling out a block of pastry and using a large skull shaped cookie cutter to make top and bottom pieces for each pie. Fill with roasted veggies or meat and carefully cut eyes, nose and lines for teeth. If some of the filling leaks out during baking it just makes it more gruesome.

Meringue bones or ghosts or monsters
Vampire smiles — two slices of red apples held together with peanut butter and mini marshmallows cut into tooth shapes … or for a sweeter version, use a digestive biscuit split in half, with the marshmallow teeth held in place with red frosting.
Toffee apples
Peanut butter pumpkins
Creepy-crawly/graveyard cupcakes — crumble dark biscuits to make the dirt and poke some gummy worms so it looks like they’re squirming around. Make it creepier by adding an oblong-shaped biscuit with RIP spelled out in frosting.
Popcorn balls
Gingerbread skeletons — We have a a special skeleton gingerdead man cookie cutter (because of course we do) but you could use a regular one and draw on skeleton designs with royal icing.
Witches’ fingers biscuits — Shape shortbread dough into fingers, using a butter knife to gently press knuckle lines. Add a sliver of almond for a fingernail.

Here’s looking at you, kid! Tinned lychees look a lot like eyeballs. You can stuff them with blueberries or maraschino cherries, then poke a small chunk of chocolate into the “iris” for the pupil. They look amazing floating in a martini glass!
Basil seeds (like the ones in falooda) swell up in liquid and could take your Halloween drink to the next level as mini eyeballs or frog spawn — along with giant tapioca balls, also known as the boba in bubble tea, which come in a variety of colours. Grass jelly and aloe vera pieces would be good too — basically anything that adds an unexpected texture to a spooky drink.
Witches’ Brew — a jet-black cocktail that looks amazing … but leave out the dry ice from this recipe! Though it looks fabulously sinister it’s dangerous in drinks unless you have a way to protect the drinker.
Shrunken head apple punch
Frogspawn Punch — kiwi plus lime jelly and lemonade!