From our kitchen · Halloween

Keto Halloween Recipes

Blackberries forming a cat's face with cucumber eyes, pumpkin-seed pupils, a blueberry nose and spaghetti whiskers, by white cheese on a blue board Five orange pumpkin-shaped deviled eggs with herb-stem stalks and parsley on a speckled white platter, on burlap with yellow flowers

Introduction

Halloween food has a job the rest of the year never asks of it: it has to look like something. A pumpkin, a cat, anything that makes someone stop and point before they reach for it.

The first three recipes below were made for exactly that, and they are the place to start. Two of them are pumpkins, and neither one has any pumpkin in it. After those come a few of our pumpkin cookies for the fall side of the season, and some chocolate and peanut butter treats for anyone who showed up for the candy. Every recipe here is one of ours, with a full recipe card.

Halloween party food

All three are dressed up as something, and all three are savory, so they sit happily on the same table. What separates them is how far ahead each one lets you work.

The cheese ball asks for the most patience and the least last-minute attention. It chills twice, an hour each time, and then waits in the fridge until shortly before serving. The deviled eggs split the work in two: boil and peel the eggs ahead, then dye, score and fill them closer to the party. The black cat board is the one you build last, about half an hour of arranging on the platter, and its only cooking is a minute in the microwave for the little cheddar pumpkins.

Two of them need one piece of kit you might not have in the drawer: a silicone pumpkin mold for the board’s cheese pumpkins, and kitchen string for the cheese ball’s ridges.

Fall cookies & desserts

These three come from our keto pumpkin recipes, where the rest of the season’s pumpkin baking lives, from pie and bread to muffins and drinks. They are here because they are the ones you can eat standing up, one hand free for a deviled egg.

Check the batch size first. The snickerdoodles make two dozen and the pumpkin cookies make 18, while the whoopie pies make six: two cookies around a cream cheese filling, which keeps them in the fridge once they are filled. Both cookie doughs need a short chill before you shape them, so leave room for that in the timing.

Low-carb Halloween treats

These are for the candy-bowl crowd. The peanut butter cups and the clusters are the closest thing on this page to something out of a trick-or-treat bag, and neither one goes in the oven. The cups are built in layers in muffin cups, with a few minutes in the freezer between each layer. The clusters are chocolate-coated peanuts, set in a mini muffin pan.

The brownies are the opposite. They bake for close to an hour, then need about 30 minutes to set before you cut them, so they are the one to start early. In return, one 8x8 pan gives you a dozen squares to put out.