How To Charcuterie for Halloween

I love making charcuterie boards and serving them as appetizers when we have gatherings at our house. I not only love the creative part in putting them together, but I also love eating charcuterie food!

Like most of you, we haven't gathered much and that's one of the worse things about this pandemic, isn't it? It was my husband's birthday weekend and we also organized pumpkin carving with my sister and her family. This meant cousin time and y'all know it's fun to hang out with cousins. So, Saturday night deserved a charcuterie board! And it's almost Halloween, so Halloween Charcuterie Board it is!

I've never done one and at the end of the night, I have to say this was the most fun to put together and the cutest! It's a good thing too because the sugar and calorie content of these items are whoa! But I mean, look at how fun this is!

 There are a lot of Halloween Charcuterie inspiration on Pinterest and Instagram and some favorites I've seen are Oreo Bats, the Mandarin Oranges as pumpkins and the googly eyes on everything! 

To enhance the Halloween theme, I included a real pumpkin, my new black Staub pumpkin dish and @dekorasyongifts Trick or Treat Box. I love seeing this text on this board!

Aside from the main items I had on my list to make the Oreo bats, the mandarin orange pumpkins, and googly eyes, I went to the grocery store to look for inspiration. I do like to see what jumps at me. This means that you do need to add extra minutes during your grocery shopping trip when you do it this way. It's not very often I can do this. I usually take my list, go in the store, check off my list and leave. This time, I enjoyed my own sweet time looking for these items that you see on this tray. Let's go over them!

~ Cheese - I always have more than one type. I included a traditional French Brie that my son's love and a Smoked Gouda for it's orange color.

~ Candy Corn - Halloween treat must have! I mixed the original flavor and the new caramel flavor that is brown/white in color. The mix of these colors in the black pumpkin dish looked amazing. 

~ Pumpkin Candies - another must!      ~ Chocolate, chocolate, and chocolate - 'tis the season, right? Use your favorites. Some are wrapped with seasonal Halloween wrapping so all you have to do is add them on the board. I peel the wrapping off these to keep the color a solid brown and I placed googly eyes.

~ Halloween themed Cookies - I found a pack of cookies with candy corn flavor & sprinkling.

~ Maple Leaf shaped Sandwich Cookies -the perfect fall leaf shape!  I will have to find these again if I do a fall charcuterie board.

~ Mini Marshmallows - my son and I skewered four marshmallows on a toothpick, drew a face and called them ghosts :)

~ Black licorice - a great item to add due to color but man, it tasted bad!

~ Salted Pretzel Bites - a savory item and I love the neutral color it added.

~ Mini Pecan Pie - I've never seen these and they are perfect for charcuterie boards. They cone in different flavors too.

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~Cuties or Mandarin orange - peel them and stick a pretzel in it. So easy!

~ Oreo Bats - my favorite on this board! I had Adrian, my 10 year old son help me make these. The process is saved on Instagram under highlights named "Charcuterie." If you have littles as young as 5 years old, I bet, they will have the best time!

Here are a couple of unexpected finds that worked well on for this Halloween theme:

~ Orange Chocolate Snowball by Tastykake. I love that these are plain orange blobs! We put googly eyes and drew a smile with our black round sprinkles. This reminds me of a twinkie so no, it's not healthy. At all! But I love the perfect orange round shape of these.

~ Ghost & Pumpkin shaped lollipops. I used these to decorate the round cheeses. I cut off the lollipop stick and placed googly eyes on them.

Was this fun or what?

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. I'm looking forward to making this a part of our holiday tradition and I hope that next Halloween, all of us can gather around the dining table or kitchen island like the old days and not only enjoy snacking on this, but also be able to enjoy one another.

Happy almost Halloween!