Image credit: Hobbycraft
Best Halloween desserts for spooky season
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If you’re hosting a party this spooky season, these deliciously eerie Halloween desserts will make a showstopping addition to any ghoulish-themed table.
Start with monstrous madeleines topped with glossy Deco melts and sugary edible eyes, followed by skeleton-shaped cakelets from Nordic Ware drizzled with white icing for bones.
For stand-out centrepieces try out whipping up a cosy, autumnal pumpkin tiramisu in a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Or a decadent chocolate tart adorned with cute spider webs and chocolate spiders. Adorable marshmallow meringue ghosts are a perennial crowd-pleaser.
If baking isn’t on your agenda, the brilliant Biscuiteers offer DIY haunted house kits or sets of delicious Halloween biscuits to delight your guests. Hubble, bubble, toil, and trouble.
Spooky madeleines
When it comes to Halloween, Hobbycraft is a one-stop shop for costumes, spooky decor and Halloween desserts. These cute madeleines are the perfect treat for any Halloween party.
To decorate the tiny sponges, Deco melts can be quickly melted in the microwave and spooned into a cleaned madeleine mould.
Pop the madeleines on top and leave the Deco melts to set hard before removing and they’ll have a lovely, glossy iced finish.
Then let your imagination run wild and create a selection of scary ghosts, spider webs, and googly sugar edible eyes on top.
Pumpkin tiramisu
Is there a more festive way to serve your ghoulish Halloween dessert than in a hollowed-out pumpkin? Especially if it’s a pumpkin tiramisu?
This twist on the classic dessert swaps the usual coffee and cocoa notes and blends the rich, creamy mascarpone mixture with a sweet pumpkin puree.
Infused with warming spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and allspice (typically found in a pumpkin pie), give this pumpkin tiramisu a distinctly autumnal taste. Try Poetry & Pies version.
Alternatively, Souffle Bombay has a brilliant recipe for a riff on a pumpkin pie to put in a hollowed-out pumpkin, which works well when serving mini pumpkins as individual desserts.
Chocolate spider tart
A chocolate spider tart will be a crowd-pleaser at any Halloween bash.
Calling it the “ultimate decadent dessert”, Jamie Oliver’s Simple Chocolate Tart recipe, with its thick, pastry base is the perfect tart to create your spider web on.
The Scran Line puts a white chocolate ganache layer on his chocolate tart, so the spider web stands out well.
After it’s chilled, work quickly to pipe a chocolate spider web on top of the white ganache. Then for the really fun part, making the chocolate spiders.
The Scran Line pipes a body and legs onto a lined baking tray with melted chocolate and puts a chocolate almond on top, for the body. A chocolate Malteser would work just as well.
Skeleton cakes
Nordic Ware sells an array of great Halloween dessert bakeware. Made from durable, cast aluminium, which is great for even heat distribution – the US-based site does deliver to the UK, but you can also shop a large selection of their products on Amazon.
Each tin has a non-stick surface for easy cleaning. Including the detailed skeleton cakelet pan (pictured).
After your bake cools, you can ice the skeleton’s bones with white icing.
There’s also the haunted skull cakelet pan, which not only make for a great skull shaped cake (pictured), but also can be used to create jiggly jelly skulls, a spooky chocolate lava cake, or skull-shaped ice cubes for a Halloween punch.
For a focal-point on the Halloween dessert table, there’s the haunted manor Bundt pan, which will look great surrounded by a graveyard scene of tombstone cakelets.
Haunted biscuits
The Biscuiteers do a fine line in sweet treat for special occasions, and Halloween is no exception. Each of their delicious biscuits is perfectly hand-iced in London.
The spooky addition comes in a set of nine and ticks off everything that goes bump in the night, from mummies and Frankenstein to vampires.
For a thoughtful Halloween gift, try the BOO letterbox biscuits, or the letterbox biscuit pumpkin, which you can add a personalised message to.
To add a craft element to your Halloween dessert, the Biscuiteers make a DIY Sugar Skulls tin, which comes complete with twelve ready baked biscuits, piping bags, icing sugar and decorations and a step-by-step guide.
- Haunted House Biscuits, hamper £39.95 – buy here
Ghostly marshmallow meringues
Too cute to be scary, these soft, squishy marshmallowy meringue ghosts are a must for any Halloween party.
The brilliant Meringue Girls (via BBC Food) have a fool-proof recipe, to make these wickedly delicious four-ingredient Halloween treats.
You’ll need 500 grams of caster sugar, 250 grams of egg whites, one teaspoon of cream of tartar, and to give it an autumnal twist, a quarter teaspoon mix of pumpkin spice mix, ground nutmeg, cinnamon and ground ginger.
Meringue Girls top tip is to pop the sugar in a roasting tin in a hot oven for five minutes until hot but not melting, to “help stabilise the egg whites and give a smooth and glossy meringue”.
Follow the full recipe here to whisk the egg whites into stiff peaks (this should take around five to seven minutes) and spoon the sugar in a tablespoon at a time.
Fold the spices through the mixture by hand.
Pipe dollops of meringue mixture to make your ghosts and bake for 40 – 50 minutes. Use an edible pen to make the ghosts eyes or use sugar edible eyes.
Mini marzipan pumpkins
These super-cute, easy to make, mini marzipan pumpkins are perfect to use on their own, or as decoration for your Halloween dessert.
Take around 200 grams of marzipan and split it in half. Colour 100 grams with orange gel food colouring, and the other half split between green and brown.
Shape the orange marzipan into small balls and use a toothpick to make the indents on the sides.
Use the brown marzipan for the stalks, and the green for leaves. Use your toothpick to stick them onto the pumpkin body and you’re good to go.
Cauldron cake
The traditional Bundt cake, which is a round one-layer cake with a hole in the middle makes an ideal canvas to create a spooky cauldron cake.
Then, to decorate, take a selection of spooky colours of icing with a nozzle (Hobbycraft’s neon green, orange, and purple work well) and freely drizzle them all over the cake.
Then cover it with monster eyes.
Halloween Black Forest trifle dessert
If you want to add a wow-factor to your Halloween dessert table, then Grits and Pinecones’ Halloween Black Forest trifle dessert (pictured) is the answer.
While it looks tricky to pull off, it’s actually easier than you might think, thanks to the American brand Peeps, which you can buy on Amazon.
Peeps are marshmallows rolled in sugar in the shapes of festive figures. For Halloween, they have pumpkins, skulls, ghosts, and monsters and come in packs, that you can line your glass trifle dishes with.
Haunted gingerbread house
Don’t wait until Christmas for your gingerbread house, the Biscuiteers have a brilliant DIY haunted gingerbread house kit to create your own masterpiece.
The kits contain six ready baked biscuits, which are each side of the house, piping bags, icing sugar, bags of decorations and a step-by-step guide.
Tesco also do a reasonably priced version of their own.
Why not make a whole scene of it and make a surrounding graveyard with edible tombstones and marshmallow ghosts.
You could add edible spider webs around the house. Try melted chocolate spider webs, spun sugar spider webs (made from melted sugar), or royal icing.
- Biscuiteers DIY Haunted House, £38 – buy here
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