Ghostly Cupcakes Recipe

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik Perhaps you buy your candy in bulk and have far too much left over after the holiday. Maybe you’re throwing a Halloween bash and need a showstopper to feed a crowd. Or you’re just feeling gluttonous. Enter the four-layer Halloween candy ice cream cake! Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik If you’re more into the blood-and-gore side of Halloween, these shortbread cookies are the ticket. They’re shaped like severed gnarled fingers, which makes them pretty gross to start. But the real kicker comes when you bite into them and they start “bleeding” a filling of raspberry jam. Vicky Wasik Sometimes making a Halloween dish is as simple as adding some ghostly decorations to a normal recipe. Here, that means starting with our foolproof pan pizza and topping it with mozzarella ghost cutouts (complete with slivers of black olives for eyes) and black-olive spiders speared with rosemary needles for legs. Vicky Wasik A cross between s’mores and those cheap plastic vampire teeth that pop up at Halloween parties, these impressive sandwich cookies are made with home-baked chocolate graham crackers, red frosting “gums,” marshmallow “teeth,” and slivered-almond “fangs.” We use a tangy cream cheese frosting for the gums, which cuts through the sweetness of the marshmallows and graham crackers. Continue to 5 of 18 below Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik This recipe makes a caramel that’s thick enough to generously coat the apple, but soft enough to bite through. Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik As far as we’re concerned, there’s only one worthy candy at the movie theater concession stand: Milk Duds. This is just like your favorite candy, perfected. Serious Eats / Christianne Winthrop Whether you’re taking to the streets or staying home to pass out candy, try stirring up a witch’s brew in your cauldron this Halloween. Made with equal parts pomegranate and cranberry juices, this deliciously dark (and alcohol-free) concoction is perfect for sipping between trips to the front door. Vicky Wasik The secret to both the charcoal color and the surprisingly nutty flavor of this moody-looking ice cream is a Japanese-style black sesame paste—substituting it with the stuff available on supermarket shelves just won’t do the trick. The paste is made from roasted, un-hulled sesame seeds, which results in a toasty and ever-so-slightly bitter flavor; we temper it here with a little brown sugar. Continue to 9 of 18 below Sugar cookies are fun to make and decorate for any holiday, but as we’ve grown up and our tastes have changed, we’re happy to apply our cookie cutters to a more savory recipe, like these thick, flaky, and buttery biscuit-like crackers. It’s a great recipe to tackle alongside your kids, who can go to town stamping out the pumpkin shapes; the knife-cut ridges are probably best left to a grown-up. Yvonne Ruperti Here, we top green-frosted chocolate cupcakes with spicy chocolate spiders made with ganache, licorice-string legs, slivered-almond fangs, and sour-candy eyes. A small amount of chili flakes added to the ganache for the spider bodies gives the cupcakes just enough kick. Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt This intensely pumpkin-flavored soup is accented with brown butter and thyme. Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik A ramen bowl of jet-black squid-ink spaghetti, squishy mussels, and lurid orange salmon roe makes a Halloween dish that’s good enough to eat. Continue to 13 of 18 below Serious Eats / Max Falkowitz An extra custardy vanilla bean base is combined with pumpkin purée and flavored with cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, dark brown sugar, and a wee nip of bourbon. Serious Eats Here, an English pub snack is re-imagined with Mexican ingredients: Devils on Horseback become Diablos a Caballo. A great snack for Halloween, or Dia de Los Muertos, or anytime a boozy beverage is in hand. Serious Eats These spider web-decorated cupcakes with a chocolate cheesecake base are the perfect sweet for a Halloween party. Serious Eats / Maggie Hoffman All the flavors of fall come together in this boozy milkshake. Don’t skip the maple whipped cream—it’s totally worth the extra effort. Continue to 17 of 18 below Serious Eats / Yvonne Ruperti Here, butter-blasted cake is layered with buttery buttercream and enrobed in chocolate ganache, making it the perfect un-scary Halloween cake. Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik If you’ve never made a gingerbread house before, there’s no time quite like Halloween. Not only is October a less chaotic time than the weeks before Christmas, a haunted house is the most forgiving sort. Is the roof slightly askew? Are the windows uneven? Did it crumble a bit around the edges? Blame it on the ghosts! Defects only add to its ramshackle charm.

Ghostly Cupcakes Recipe