Adam and I threw a somewhat last minute Spooky Food Potluck party last weekend. Here’s a bunch of pictures!

Roughly, in order from left to right and top to bottom:

• Black and white dips — black hummus and miso yogurt dip
• Lightly roasted purple vegetables (because as everyone knows, purple is a spooooooky color)
• Ghoulie crackers — spicy cheddar sourdough crackers
• Mummified hearts — prunes stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped in prosciutto
• Bedeviled eggs — kimchi deviled eggs
• River Styx punch — red wine punch with carved apple faces. It started out more in the vein of a fall spice sangria, but ended with absinthe and mezcal (as it is wont to do in our house).
• Vomiting pumpkin — guacamole, salsa, tortilla chips
• Mini mummies — jalapeno poppers (guest appearance by my slippered foot)
• Detached eyeballs — donut holes, Twizzlers, chocolate buttons
• Dirt cups — chocolate pudding with crushed Oreos and sour gummy worms
• Bloody cake — devil’s food cake with peanut butter Swiss meringue buttercream, topped with berry “blood” and crushed pretzels

I forgot to snag pics of witch finger grapes (also known as moon drops), pani puri, spaghetti brains (spaghetti with a spicy meat sauce served in a copper skull — you can see the container a little in the dirt cups pic), and graveyard vegetables (roasted brussels sprouts and potatoes).

Originally, I was going to make a bunch of cake pops for the party. For someone who has never played with candy melts before, I got waaaaaay overly ambitious with my plans–I had something like five or six designs drawn up. I made these eight lumpy monsters after dealing with a bunch of candy melt issues and scrapped the whole project because there just wasn’t enough time.

While we love Halloween (spooky! cute! witchy-ness!), we usually don’t do much to celebrate (besides collecting a new improbable skeleton per year), but this might become something of a tradition because it was so. much. fun. Possibly I’ll try to make cake pops again, but no promises.