6 Ways to Make Ordinary Food Look Scary For Halloween

?Hopefully, October 31st is the one and only day that it’s acceptable to eat dishes with names like dried scabs, mad scientist body parts, kitty litter cake and boogers on a stick. It’s also the time of year to make food look creepy and unappetizing, so we’ve amassed a few techniques for doing just that.

1) It’s all about the food coloring

The orange food coloring will be like flies on an open zombie wound in the next few weeks, or if we remember from our childhood correctly, the red and yellow mixed together. Black is also Halloween-chic, which is created by mixing all of the colors together in a murky wreck. Nothing says “Happy Halloween” like black mashed potatoes with orange cream gravy.

2) Putting stuff in test tubes

If it’s red and viscous, even better. Shooters of all kinds, alcoholic and otherwise, are appropriate for this party pleaser, with spiked gazpacho or thick tomato soup as the surprising stand-in for blood. Syringes (minus the needles of course) would be an equally disturbing alternative, and also fantastic for orange, black or red Jell-O shots.

3) Dry ice

Place a small bowl with punch, cold soup or anything liquid-y that you want to keep mildly cool inside a larger bowl with warm water and dry ice, and you have an instant foggy evening right in the comfort of your own home (or garage as some Halloween parties go). Add it to your skin and you’ll get burns, so proceed on this one with caution.

4) Dip it in melted green cheese

Not to be confused with blue cheese, this involves green food coloring and Cheez Whiz or some other incarnation of this guilty pleasure. You can use pretzels, raw veggies, or make your Rotel and Velveeta cheese dip look like some wickedly disgusting vomit, and how bad can that be?

5) Ground it up until it looks like dirt

Anything containing Oreos, cream cheese and powdered sugar can do no wrong. Grind it into a muddy paste, stick some fake gravestones, a few gummy worms and if you’re really sinister, some tiny yellow icing maggots on top and you’ve got an instant Halloween classic.

6) Capture it in Jell-O

Putting strawberry pulp inside red Jell-O equals ground-up flesh; placing melon balls inside green Jell-O could pass for eyeballs floating in a sea of goo. Get really frisky and add some gummy rats for a dessert so awesome, it may plague you to eat it.