Halloween Party Food: 30 Dishes That Look the Part

Thirty Halloween dishes, with the bit that actually makes each one work. Most Halloween food fails in the same way — it looks like the picture for about four minutes and then sags, melts or goes grey — so every entry below says what to do about that.

There is a make-ahead order at the end. If you are cooking for a party rather than browsing, start there and work backwards.

The savoury table (1–10)

1. Mummy sausage rolls. Puff pastry cut into long 1cm strips and wound round a sausage with gaps for the bandages. Leave a bare band for the face and press two dots of cream cheese with a peppercorn or olive centre on after baking — eyes added before the oven turn into a grimace.
2. Yummy mummy calzone. The same idea at dinner scale: pizza dough wrapped in strips around pepperoni and mozzarella, marinara for dipping. Brush the strips with egg and leave the gaps unbrushed, so the bandages brown and the face stays pale.
3. Witch’s-finger breadsticks. Roll breadstick dough thin, pinch two knuckle dents, score them, and press a flaked almond in at the tip. Push the almond in hard — they lift off as the dough rises.
4. Green witch’s-brew soup. Pea and spinach, blitzed and passed. Swirl cream on the surface in a spiral and drag a skewer through it from the centre out to make a web. Serve it in mugs so people can hold it standing up.
5. Jack-o’-lantern stuffed peppers. Orange bell peppers with faces cut into them, filled with rice, mince or beans and baked. Cut the faces with a small serrated knife rather than a smooth one, or the flesh tears.
6. Spider deviled eggs. Standard deviled eggs, with half a black olive as the body and thin slivers as legs. Make the filling the day before and pipe on the day — filled eggs weep overnight.
7. Bat wings. Sticky soy-and-molasses chicken wings, roasted dark. The darkest thing you can put on the table without food colouring, and the only savoury item here that people will queue for.
8. Spooky charcuterie board. A board built to a colour scheme instead of at random: black grapes, blackberries, dark crackers, orange cheddar, dried apricot, with cheese cut into pumpkins by a small cutter. No cooking at all, which makes it the safest thing to hand to children.
9. Mac and cheese in mini pumpkins. Bake small pumpkins with the lids on for 30 minutes first, then fill with macaroni cheese and bake again. The pumpkin cooks into the sauce and it is genuinely good, not just a serving trick.
10. Toasted pumpkin seeds from whatever you carved. Boil them in salted water for ten minutes before roasting — the step that makes them crisp instead of leathery.

Sweets and desserts (11–22)

11. Ghost meringues. Pipe a blob with a peak, bake at 200°F (95°C) for 90 minutes, cool in the switched-off oven. Add chocolate eyes once completely cold; warm meringue melts them into smudges.
12. Peanut butter cups. Chocolate, then peanut butter mixed with icing sugar, then chocolate, in paper cases. Twenty minutes of work and an hour in the fridge.
13. Honeycomb. Sugar and golden syrup to hard-crack, then bicarbonate of soda stirred in. It quadruples in the pan, so use one three times bigger than you think. Do not stir after the bicarb goes in beyond three seconds.
14. Toffee apples, the only Halloween food that is also the decoration. Wipe every apple with hot water first — the wax coating is why toffee slides off.
15. Graveyard trifle. Chocolate cake, chocolate custard, crushed biscuit “soil”, shortbread headstones piped with names. Assemble within two hours or the headstones soften and slump.
16. Spiderweb brownies. Melted white chocolate piped in rings on a warm brownie, then dragged from the centre out with a skewer.
17. Monster eyeball truffles. Cake pops rolled and dipped white, with a chocolate iris and a piped red vein. The veins are the whole effect; a plain white ball reads as a snowball.
18. Candy apple slices for anyone who does not want a whole toffee apple — cut, sticked and dipped, which also halves the setting time.
19. Pumpkin pie, made from a small dense cooking pumpkin rather than the carving one, which is watery and bland.
20. Chocolate bark with whatever is in the cupboard broken over it. No shaping and no setting ring, and it uses up ends of bags.
21. Marshmallow ghosts on sticks, dipped in white chocolate. The three-minute version for when nothing is ready and people have arrived.
22. Dirt cups: chocolate mousse, crushed biscuit, a gummy worm half-buried. The one every child under eight will make straight for.

Drinks (23–30)

23. Poison apple punch. Cloudy apple juice, cinnamon, a splash of grenadine at the bottom so it graduates red to gold. Add the grenadine last and do not stir.
24. Witch’s potion. Blue curaçao or blue syrup over lemonade, which turns green in the glass. The colour change is the trick, so pour it in front of people.
25. Black-as-night lemonade, coloured with activated charcoal or squid-ink-dark blackberry syrup. Blackberry tastes better.
26. Bloody mary bar — the savoury drink that does the theme for you with no effort at all.
27. Mulled cider, which is what everyone actually drinks once they have been outside for an hour.
28. Dry-ice cauldron punch, with the standing rule: dry ice goes in the outer bowl, never in the drink or in a glass. It burns, and a chip of it swallowed is an emergency.
29. Frozen-hand ice block. Fill a clean disposable glove with water, freeze, peel it off, and float it in the punch bowl. Freeze it two days ahead; a glove takes far longer than a tray.
30. Hot chocolate with a toasted marshmallow ghost on top, for the doorstep shift.

The order to make things in

The failure mode of a Halloween spread is everything needing the oven and your hands in the last ninety minutes.

• Two days ahead: the frozen hand, honeycomb (in an airtight tin), meringues, bark.
• The day before: deviled-egg filling, soup, brownies un-iced, cake for pops, sausage rolls assembled raw on a tray in the fridge.
• The morning: truffles, toffee apples, mac and cheese assembled unbaked, punch base without the fizz or the grenadine.
• The last hour: bake the sausage rolls and the mac and cheese, pipe the webs, fill the eggs, cut the fruit for the board.
• On the table: anything with cream, custard or meringue goes out last and comes in again after an hour.

For children’s hands specifically

Sort by heat, not by difficulty. Anything with molten sugar — honeycomb, toffee apples, candy of any kind — reaches temperatures well above boiling and belongs to an adult with a small audience. Assembly is where children are actually useful and actually interested: the charcuterie board, wrapping mummy dough, pressing almond fingernails, dragging the skewer through the web, burying the worms.

If you would rather not run the kitchen

All of the above is a lot of Saturday. Rockoly’s Halloween cooking specials run the same dishes live with a chef and the ingredients delivered — Spooky Charcuterie is the no-heat one, the Yummy Mummy Calzone hands everyone dough to wrap, and Trick or Treat Candy is the molten-sugar one done under supervision.

For a team rather than a household, virtual Halloween ideas has the full line-up, what each costs and the free games worth running yourself. For the low-waste version of the evening — costumes, bags and using the whole pumpkin — see eco-friendly Halloween.