Published: October 13, 2009 12:39 am      

FOOD: Chefs seeking Halloween treats ideas just need a bit of Internet inspiration

When it comes to making scary foods to delight children at Halloween, a grocery store’s bulk food section is a great place to turn the sweetest dish into a creepy creation.

Gummy worms look magnificent creeping up or hanging off cupcakes or climbing out of pudding cups.

Licorice strings make great spider legs, stuck to cookies and cupcakes with frosting. Fruit roll-ups make great bat wings, and candy corn makes great looking teeth.

Cooks who want to have some fun at Halloween can find a bag full of ideas on the Internet, where sites offer easy inspiration

Allrecipes.com borrows the gingerbread house from another season and recreates it as a much spookier Halloween House, with candy corn on the roof and orange sugar gourds in the pumpkin patch.

The site, which is a recipe sharing and networking location, also offers a full color printable book with Halloween recipes and party ideas, and even includes a recipe for making “warts, scabs and road rash,” using gelatin.

Another site, scaryhalloween recipes.net, seems to be set up just let visitors know they are the “lucky winner” of some prize which I didn’t investigate (I was the lucky winner every time I clicked on the site.) But it also features some interesting recipes including a very simple one called “Cool Apple Bites” using apples slices cut to look like open mouth with slivered almonds for teeth.

Another version of the apple mouth can be found at the Better Homes and Gardens recipe site, bhg.com, uses candy corn for teeth held in place on a carved apple slice with peanut butter.

Basically, when it comes to Halloween recipes, it’s pretty easy to use your imagination and make the average foods scarier.

The pointy sugar ice cream cone, secured to a cookie with frosting makes a number of appearances on Halloween recipe offerings, making a great witches hat for kids to decorate with sprinkles and frosting.

Better Homes and Gardens suggests dunking the cone in chocolate and placing it on a chocolate doughnut to make it look like a witches hat, decorated with candy pieces.

Frosting is used lavishly throughout the recipes online, including on the “Jack Skellington” cupcakes, which require only a batch of cupcakes, vanilla frosting, a tube of black decorator’s icing and two toothpicks to create Jack’s face. The recipe suggests frosting the cupcakes with the white frosting, using the toothpicks to sketch out two oval eyes on each cake and filling the eyes in with black decorator frosting. The black frosting is also used to create a ghoulish barbed smile on each cake.

Family.go.com, a Disney site, also features some other easy to duplicate Halloween recipes, including an exposed brain made out of a peeled small watermelon and eyeballs on forked made out of doughnut holes dipped in white chocolate and decorated with red decorator frosting for a nice bloodshot eye look and semi-sweet chocolate pieces as tasty pupils.

A quick scan of the Internet reveal recipes too ghoulish to recreate here, including a creepy plastic skull slathered in cranberry sauce and luncheon meat on divinedinnerparty.com; or a vomiting pumpkin at celebrate-halloween.com.

In short, it’s pretty easy to hit a few keys and find some great party ideas online, but if you are computer challenged, it’s also easy to add some gummy worms to your dessert or some cut olives as eyes on your deviled eggs or glue some green pepper fingernails onto your cheese sticks to get into the spirit.

The kids will love it. Even the big ones.

The recipe for the gingerbread used in the Halloween House by Allrecipes.com is below. A house template can be found on the site, but ambitious chefs can use their imagination (or graham crackers or sheets of cooked store-bought cookie dough) to create the cookie base of the house.



Classic Gingerbread Cutouts Recipe

for Halloween Cookie House



1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup brown sugar

2/3 cup molasses

2 eggs

4 cups all-purpose flour divided

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger



1 pound confectioners’ sugar

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

3 egg whites



Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl cream together the butter and brown sugar until smooth. Stir in the molasses and eggs. Combine 1 1/2 cups of the flour, baking soda, sale, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, and ginger. Beat into the molasses mixture. Gradually stir in the remaining flour by hand to form a stiff dough.

Divide dough into two pieces. On a lightly floured surface roll out dough to 1/8 inch thickness. Cut into desired shapes. Place pieces one inch apart on cookie sheets. Refrigerate for 15 minutes. Bake for 8 to ten minutes. Cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

Icing

In a medium bowl, sift together confectioners’ sugar and cream of tartar. Blend in egg whites. Using an electric mixer on high speed, beat for about 5 minutes or until mixture is thick and stiff. Keep covered with moist cloth until ready to decorate.