Halloween is just a little over a week away and while candy is certainly the number one culinary choice for the season, there are other foods that can be just as enticing. One suggestion is a spooky crudité platter served on your EndGrain Cutting Board that you can share with friends and family, a fun way to have a healthy snack between all the sugar and chocolate! Today we’ll show you how to make brains, eyeballs, and witches’ fingers to munch on. To finish your spooky crudité platter off, we’ll provide instructions on assembling a skull centerpiece and bell pepper jack-o-lanterns.
1. Witches Fingers
Ingredients & Tools
- Paring Knife
- Baby carrots
- Sliced almonds
- Whipped cream cheese
First, take the baby carrot and cut some notches along the middle, these will simulate the creases on the back of the finger. Then, cut a small half-moon shape out of the top end of the carrot.
Apply a small amount of cream cheese and then place a sliced almond on top.
2. Eyeballs
Ingredients & Tools
- Knife
- Cucumber
- Pimento stuffed olives (sliced)
- Whipped Cream Cheese
- Red Food Coloring (not pictured)
- Toothpick
To create an eyeball, first wash your cucumber; then slice the cucumber into rounds.
Take one slice of olive and attach to the middle of the cucumber slice with a little cream cheese.
Next, take your toothpick and dip it into the red food coloring, and drag it in squiggles away from the olive slice to mimic blood vessels.
3. Brains
Ingredients & Tools:
- Knife
- Paring Knife
- Cauliflower
- Red Food Coloring
- Toothpick
Take a head of cauliflower and wash it and then cut it into florets. In the middle of a floret and make a slice along the length of it.
With a toothpick, apply little lines of red food coloring to mimic blood vessels
Repeat with all florets.
4. Bell Pepper Jack O Lanterns
Ingredients & Tools:
- Bell Pepper
- Paring Knife
For this to work well it’s important to pick a larger, squat, square-ish bell pepper.
Any color bell pepper will work, but we went with orange to mimic a pumpkin. Wash and dry your bell pepper and then cut the stem and top off using zig-zag cuts.
Once the top is removed, cut off the seeds and membrane from inside using your paring knife. You can even give it another rinse to help remove all the seeds.
Now carve a silly or spooky jack-o-lantern face into one side of the bell pepper.
If you plan to fill the bell pepper with a dip, keep that in mind and don’t make any of the face holes too big.
5. Cauliflower Skull Centerpiece
Ingredients & Tools:
- Head of Cauliflower (may need one to two, based on size)
- Knife
- Paring Knife
- Grape Tomatoes
- Toothpicks
To assemble the cauliflower skull, you’ll need to use some creativity and work with the shape of the head of cauliflower you have. Here are a few steps to take to help get that bone-chilling skull shape.
Break the cauliflower down into shapes that mimic part of a skull. You can carve teeth from the stalk to help give more dimension to each area of the skull.
Using toothpicks, attach the pieces together – cauliflower is a natural product, it won’t look exactly as it does in these photos.
Use smaller cauliflower florets cut off in the carving process to help fill in gaps like the nose bridge and around the eye sockets.
To give the illusion of a jaw we’ve placed smaller florets together in a u-shape.
Once the jaw is placed, place the jaw piece on top. If it won’t stay still, it can be stabilized with toothpicks. Finish off the look with grape tomatoes for the eyes!
We recommend building the skull on the EndGrain Cutting Board before you lay out the rest of the crudité platter.
Once you have your skull assembled, fill the rest of the wood cutting board with your brains, witches’ fingers, and eyeballs! To protect your EndGrain Cutting Board from the red food dye on the brains and eyeballs, we recommend cutting small squares of parchment paper or wax paper, placing those on your EndGrain wood cutting board and then place the cauliflower brains and cucumber eyeballs on top of the parchment or wax paper.
Happy Halloween!
