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Get Frighteningly Creative With Your Halloween Pizza

27 September 2018

Antonio Alexander

When you think of Halloween, you may summon images of ghosts, demons, witches, spiders and so on—but does the word "pizza" automatically spring to mind? If it doesn't, perhaps it should. After all, pizza has proven itself a remarkably flexible "platform" for all kinds of ingredients, tastes, and themes, from casual football parties to elegant Valentine's Day dinners. Why shouldn't your next Halloween party take advantage of this delicious form of entertainment? Check out some of these basic concepts and ideas for conjuring your own Halloween pizza creations.

Scary Shapes

You probably know by now that pizzas don't have to be round. Pizza pans now come in a variety of novel shapes, including some very useful Halloween themes. If you want to serve individual pizza rolls to your guests, for instance, you might consider purchasing bakery pans in the shape of skulls. Simply line the bottom half of the skull "molds" with your dough, place your fillings inside, wrap dough over the fillings, and attach the top part of the pan assembly. You could also get creative with a cookie cutter to make scary shapes out of a completed whole pizza.

Do you anticipate that you will have leftover pizza at the end of your Halloween bash, or that some of your guests may need to eat and run? Packing up those leftover portions provides another opportunity to get chillingly creative. If any member of your haunted house has some cardboard-shaping skills, you can create individual "coffins" for those leftover slices or pizza rolls. You can also purchase some little plastic treat-or-trick pumpkins, skulls, or other ready-made themed containers to send your guests home with their "remains."

Terrifying Toppings

You don't have to order a specially styled Halloween pizza from your local pizzeria—you can make your own brilliantly spooky designs with no limits on your creativity (and probably for less money as well). You might start by thinking about your available color palette. Halloween features orange and black as its signature colors, but the typical pizza sports a topping of white cheese such as mozzarella or provolone. You can add some orange simply by mixing your white cheese with cheddar. (Cheddar by itself may not give you the even melt and gooey consistency you want.) Paprika can also lend an orange look to your cheese before baking, as long as you don't mind that extra flavoring. Just remind your guests that Dracula was Hungarian.

If you feel especially ambitious, have a particularly adventurous crowd coming over, and can get your hands on several whole squid, you can serve a black pizza with a squid-ink dough or topping. Save the tentacles as the finishing touch to a pizza that looks like it crawled out of a horror film. More conventional toppings include "spiders" fashioned out of sliced black olives, red devil faces shaped from red pepper pieces, and "eyes" made from olive slices sitting on round slices of white cheese. 

Devilish Dessert Pizzas

Modern-day pizza creativity extends beyond dinner to dessert. This suits Halloween perfectly, with the holiday's emphasis on sweets of all kinds. Chocolate makes an ideally dark, ominous-looking topping for a Halloween dessert pizza. It also does a beautiful job of setting off colorful seasonal treats such as candy corn or marshmallow ghosts of your own creation. If you feel the naughty urge to add some "gore," a gooey drizzle of raspberry or strawberry topping ought to fill the bill while adding an extra flavor dimension to your devilish dessert. Add a few chunky chocolate tombstones, and you've got terrifyingly tempting creation.

Pizza has come a long way from its modest mozzarella-and-tomato origins. Take this culinary staple the rest of the way this Halloween by whipping out the pizza pans and cooking up some creativity!

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