Just like Christmas and Thanksgiving, Halloween is a time for making lots of yummy things to eat. But the recipes are a bit different from those other two traditional holidays. Here are a couple that trick-or-treaters will appreciate.

Bake with Reckless Abandon this Halloween

Make a whole array of Halloween holiday treats and your little devils will all turn into angels.

Get everyone in the Halloween mood by serving cobweb brownies -yes, exactly brownies covered in cobwebs- and add some gore with icky eyeballs.

If you have kids to entertain on a rainy afternoon, close to Halloween, enlist their help to prepare black cat cupcakes or fudgy bat cookies, both treats are time consuming but easy to make. Children can take them to school to share with friend. They are also a great edible decoration for boot to boot trick or treating.

Busy mothers can buy cookies and pre-made marzipan decorations and icing. Having fun with the kids decorating cakes, cookies and brownies is more important than the actual baking. Find some ideas below.

 Halloween Cookies

• 1 batch of home baked cookies
• Writing icing and ordinary icing in several colors
• Miniature sweets
• Sugar paste
• Food cologing

Procedure

1. Paint Halloween motives on the surface using the icing. Use the miniatur sweets to make faces  and sticking them on  with the icing.
2. Use the food coloring to paint pieces of sugar paste in several colors. Cut out shapes –a black oblog piece could be a spider’s body- and stick onto the cookies using icing.

Tips

Gingerbread is great for this. You can even shape the cookies when baking them and do gingerbread witches instead of gingerbread men.

Use a packet of plain cookies if you don’t have time to bake your own.

Marzipan Bats

• 1 packet marzipan
• Black and red food coloring coloring

1. Mix most of the marzipan with black food coloring until it is very dark. Make a smaller amount of red colored marzipan -and grey, if you with to give more detail to your bats..
2. Shape the dark marzipan into a bat. give it red eyes. Use grey marzipan for the lines on the wings, for instance.

Tips

Make mini-bats and use them to decorate orange-iced cupcakes. Or turn the black marzipan into miniature witches hats.

Coconut Ghosts

One of the easiest recipes to prepare, just shape the coconut mix into cones, bake,  give each cone a pair of eyes, and they are ready.

Ingredients

• 2 egg whites
• 5 Tbs sugar
• 5 Tbs dessicated coconut
• rice paper
• mini chocolate chips
• icing to stick the chips

Procedure

• Preheat oven to 200°F (150°C).
• Whisk the egg whites until stiff.  Add coconut and sugar, mxing carefully.
• Lay teh rice paper on the baking sheet. Take a large spoonful of coconut mix and place on top of the rice paper, shaping it into a cone.
• Bake for 40 minutes on the center rack. The cakes should be tender inside, crisp outside and not browned at all.
• With the icing, stick two mini chocolate chips on each cake to make the eyes of the ghosts.

About the Author

Mariah Deavine is interested in nutrition and the healing properties of food. At All Foods Natural, she points at healthy food or identifies the real benefits of having breakfast and explained the requirements for a balanced first meal of the day, even when you don't fancy cooking.