Creative, Homemade Halloween Recipes

You can get creative with recipes for Christmas and decorations for Fourth of July, but no holiday is quite as fun as Halloween when it comes to looks. You can have all manner of decorations, from simple carved pumpkins to full-sized haunted house displays, and can take your holiday treats from snack sized candy bars to more elaborate, homemade treats, like Vampire Cupcakes. The food, like the decorations, should be fun and there is no real limit to how creative you can be. It’s a great time to experiment. After all, in the even that a treat doesn’t turn out looking the way you hoped, you can always say that it was just supposed to be an extra-scary zombie version of the cookie, cake or cupcake, right?

Here are some great, fun ideas for Halloween recipes. Don’t wait until the night before the holiday – some of these are too good to give away to trick-or-treaters!

• Vampire Cupcakes and Vampire Cookies are two of my absolute favorite Halloween recipes, both “bleed” fruity red fillings when you bite into them. They’re also perfect for non-Halloween occasions, like a Twilight movie viewing party.
• Speaking of vampire treats, a big batch of raspberry jam-filled Vampire Pancakes is a great way to get Halloween off on the right foot.
• Slime Filled Cupcakes from the Black Lagoon are another creepy cupcake, filled with oozing, bright green lime curd!
• Dirt Cupcakes are yet another cupcake – but these aren’t filled with ooey gooey slime or blood like the above cupcakes are. Instead, they’re covered with chocolate cake crumbs (and gummy worms!) that give them their dirt-like appearance.
• Franken Berry Cereal Bars and Spooky Peanut Butter Puff Truffles are fantastic for making with kids because both are easy and start with boxed cereal. Kids can pretty much do everything themselves, with just a little adult supervision.
• The recipes for both Halloween M&M Cookies and Leftover Halloween Candy Bundt Cake incorporate regular Halloween candy. The cookies get a festive look from dark, creepily-colored seasonal M&Ms, while the cake is best made the day after Halloween when you have a bag of leftover mini chocolates that needs to be used up.
• The cookies pictured at the top are part of a batch of Skeleton Gingerbread cookies, decorated to look like carved pumpkins. Mummy Cookies with White Chocolate Wrapping are a good alternative if you prefer to start out with a chocolate, rather than spice, base.
• Candy apples are another classic recipe. Make sure to start out with some good apples, and either dip them into melted caramels or make a batch of Salted Maple Caramel Apples for a variation with a little extra fall flavor.
• Not everything needs to be themed. Pumpkin Pie Cupcakes and Pumpkin Brownies with Pecans are both good choices, getting pumpkin in to make them Halloween-appropriate, but perfectly appropriate for other fall and winter occasions, too.
• If you see a bag of Halloween Oreos, you might want to pick it up to try out some black and orange Halloween Oreo Cheesecakes