Sur la Table
Halloween kitchen gadgets run the gamut from delightfully disgusting to creepy-cutesy. With so many ghoulish baking tools and serving pieces for prepping a perfect Halloween party spread, you’ve officially run out of excuses not to get festive this fall.
Halloween celebrations should be irresistibly haunting and undeniably delicious, sure, but it’s not just about decorations and recipes for creepy cookies, demonic apples and blood-red punch. To create the perfect ambiance, your food and drink need a petrifying presentation, including bloodcurdling barware and spine-chilling serving supplies.
Read on for our favorite Halloween tools and party gear to make your nastiest nibbles and trickiest treats and then serve them up to guests in style.
Read more: How to buy the cheapest Halloween candy | Halloween 2019: High-tech decorations we can’t resist
Disclosure: CNET may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
Target
This spirit board-inspired serving tray is the perfect vehicle for cupcakes, cookies or edible body parts (if you have a hard time choosing, you can buy a trio of brain, heart and severed hand molds, which gives a new meaning to the term finger food).
Sur la Table
A cheese plate is always welcome and you can make one Halloween-themed with bright orange cheddar, purple-black fresh figs and grapes, bone-thin breadsticks, rosy folds of flesh (in the form of prosciutto and other charcuterie), olive eyeballs and ruby-red fruit compote. Then let guests spear their desired tidbits with these charming witchy broom picks.
Sur la Table
If you make something more substantial — say, butternut squash soup or a witches’ brew of chili — there’s no better vessel to bring it out than in a pumpkin-shaped cocotte, whether in classic burnt orange or cauldron black. Even if you’re not cooking, you can use it as a punch bowl (in which case, we’re partial to this Smoking Swamp Halloween Punch recipe) or stock up on a few mini versions for serving, too.
Amazon
Shots will go straight to your head — twice if you pour them in these creepy glass skulls. But serve flaming shots at your own risk.
Amazon
If your plan is to treat your guests to some nice whiskey, cognac, vodka or rum there’s no better place to decant it on all hallow’s eve than this creepy-cool glass skull — which kind of works all year round, to be honest.
Wayfair
Maybe you’ve got more of a cocktail crew on your hands. Well then, consider these skeletal highball glasses for your vodka and blood orange juice screwdrivers.
Walmart
This big ol’ glass skull is the perfect place to stash your pumpkin beers, hard seltzers or white wines over ice. You could also fill it with fun-sized candy or serve a blood-red punch. (Though you might have to do some lifting and angling to get those last few drops.)
Amazon
Bake the haunted house of your darkest dream. Nordic Ware’s haunted manor Bundt pan has a ten-cup volume, so it will feed plenty of your visiting vampires, zombies and fiends. (But if you prefer a haunted castle, you can go with their turreted Bundt pan boasting plenty of walls and hollows to populate with edible evil creatures.) Either way, decorating is sure to be a scream.
Amazon
Live your full Dia de los Muertos fantasy. And since the Mexican “Day of the Dead” directly overlaps with American Halloween in 2019, it’s the perfect year to bust out this fun mold and decorate a few colorful Coco-inspired cookies.
Amazon
Use your head. Nordic Ware’s large skull cake pan makes a happy (hey, it’s smiling) sight. If you’d rather serve small cakes than large ones, these small molds must be the skulls of shrunken heads. This lemon pound cake makes clean white skulls of either size. Add white food coloring to the mix and brighten the sweet-crumbed bones of the dead — or coat them in a white chocolate glaze once the cake is cool. For extra-gross Halloween greatness, use patches of icing to stick on cropped licorice strings for tattered hair.
Amazon
To prove the skull’s empty, set it next to a brain: Opaque pink Jello is ideal brain food, though if you want to keep it accurate (and somehow even more disgusting), go with something gray.
This article was originally written for Chowhound by Seanan Forbes.