When the kids were younger, October half term always used to include at least one baking day. Sometimes it was just a case of making some cakes and decorating them with whatever Halloween-themed treats we could get our hands on, but other times we went a step further and made something a bit more technical. 😉
I’ve been really enjoying looking back through some of my older blog posts recently, especially the ones where I’ve shared things I’ve made with the kids over the years. Some of them go back well over ten years now, and it’s lovely reading them again and remembering how much fun we used to have in the kitchen together.
I thought I’d pull together a few of our favourite Halloween baking ideas in one place because they’re all things we actually made together, with varying degrees of success and quite often with a fair bit of mess along the way and always a lot of fun making memories together. 😁
Halloween Meringue Ghosts
How to make Halloween meringue ghosts
These little meringue ghosts take me right back to 2010, when Miss Frugal and I made them for a Halloween baking competition.
I had absolutely no idea how to separate eggs at the time and ended up asking for advice on Twitter, while Miss Frugal was thoroughly unimpressed with the whole process because she thought the egg whites felt like ‘smelly jelly’. 😂
We didn’t even have a proper piping bag, so we improvised with a sandwich bag and cut the corner off. They turned out surprisingly well, although we did manage to destroy a few when we were decorating them.
Halloween Marshmallow Cake Pops
Our alternative to Halloween cake pops
Look what just popped up in my Facebook memories. The easiest and yummiest Halloween craft ever!
These came about after an attempt at making proper cake pops didn’t quite go according to plan, so we ended up making a much easier version using marshmallows instead.
They’re a lovely one to make with younger children because there’s no actual baking involved and most of the fun is in decorating them. You can make them as spooky or as silly as you like, and they’re much less fiddly than making traditional cake pops.
Halloween Pumpkin Peppers
Not everything we made for Halloween involved chocolate or icing sugar, and these little pumpkin peppers were always such a fun idea.
They’re basically orange peppers carved to look like Halloween pumpkins and filled with couscous, although you could easily use another filling if you preferred.
I love these because they’re something a bit different, and carving little faces into peppers is a lovely way to get the kids involved in making their own tea.
Halloween Chocolate Bark
Easy Halloween Chocolate Bark Recipe
Chocolate bark is one of those things that looks much more impressive than the effort involved, which is exactly my kind of recipe. 😉
It’s also brilliant for making with kids because once the chocolate is melted, they can have fun adding Halloween sprinkles, sweets and whatever other decorations you’ve managed to find.
You can break it into pieces once it’s set, and it makes a lovely little Halloween treat without needing to spend a fortune on ingredients.
Halloween Sugar Cookies
I’ve also been making a batch of easy homemade sugar cookies this weekend, which are perfect for cutting into Halloween shapes and decorating with coloured icing.
I’ve got a lovely box of biscuit cutters that I’ve collected over the years, including a couple of old Be-Ro cutters that my Nana gave me many, many years ago. I don’t bake biscuits nearly as often as I used to, but getting them out again reminded me just how much I enjoy it.
The basic sugar cookie recipe is really straightforward, and you can make the dough ahead of time, which is handy if you want to split the baking and decorating over a couple of days.
Looking back at all these old recipes has made me realise just how many happy memories we made doing something as simple as spending an afternoon baking together. We didn’t always have the right equipment, things didn’t always go to plan and I’m pretty sure the kitchen usually looked like a bomb had hit it afterwards, but that was all part of the fun.
And if you’re looking for something to do with the kids this October half term, hopefully one or two of these ideas might inspire your own Halloween baking afternoon. You definitely don’t need to spend a fortune or make anything complicated to have a lovely time together.
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