Frighteningly good ways to celebrate Halloween with food

Whether you're throwing a party or having a quiet night in with a horror film, there are lots of treats you can make…

If you’re (blood-)thirsty for a spooktacular celebration on Halloween, ditch the tricks and give yourself and loved ones a treat with these skele-fun baking ideas…

• Spooky pancakes: Give your pancakes or fluffy American pancakes stalks so they looks like pumpkins, and decorate them with a chocolate sauce cobweb or spider shapes.
• Use pumpkin flesh (or any squash) to make Halloween waffles. You don’t even need a waffle iron, just a griddle pan! #squashgoals
• Put pumpkin spice in all sorts of breakfast favourites, from the top of your coffee to fragrant porridge and pancakes. If you want to make your own, mix together 1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon with ½ teaspoon each of ginger, allspice, ground cloves and grated nutmeg (but surprisingly no pumpkin!).

Have a Halloween party

Throwing a party? There are fang-tastic food-based activities you can include:

• Who said treasure hunts were just for Easter? Plan one for kids, but with spooky Halloween cookies instead of chocolate eggs.

• Try a Halloween cocktail or mocktail. We’ve got a wicked mocktail for kids and boozy ones for adults!

• Have a toffee apple party. Get a selection of toppings so everyone can make their own piece of edible art.

• Be a lazy bones and have a movie night with Halloween party food. There are plenty of Halloween programmes to choose from on CBBC, or for adults iPlayer has some epic horror choices – you won’t even have to share the food with a crowd!

• Make a ghoulish dinner for the kids, with spaghetti worms and zombie eyes (green dyed eggs). Alternatively, for a grown-up meal, Nigella's squash and sweet potato curry with black rice, or Nadiya's blended purple beetroot pasta, scream Halloween.

Spook up your cake

Put edible eyes and gummy worms on everything, from cakes, cookies and brownies to sausage roll mummies. Custard creams make great tombstones, and you can create cobwebs from melted marshmallows – click the cobweb cake above for a video showing how it’s done!

Transform cake into a ghoulish treat with orange, green, purple and black food colouring. Make spooky decorations for a Halloween cake or Halloween cupcakes. Lay a sheet of fondant over your cake for a simple ghost cake. If you’ve found the perfect frightful Halloween design on the internet, use our sponge cake calculator to make the cake size you want. MUAHAHA.

The trick is to treat yourself

Yes trick or treaters want the packaged stuff, but for yourself or your own party? Make the fudge, chocolates, cake or biscuits of your dreams / nightmares.

Originally published October 2020