Review Detail

Spooky Snacks and Treats: Frightfully Fun Halloween Recipes for Kids

Middle Grade Non-Fiction 618

Realistic Recipes for Halloween

November 22, 2022

Overall rating

5.0

Writing Style

5.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

5.0

Learning Value

5.0

I'm a big fan of cookbooks, but my students don't check them out as much as I like. They do like Halloween, however, and this cookbook had a lot of things to recommend it. There are 42 recipes, instead of the ten or so found in something like Tumley's Cool Creepy Food Art (2010), and they are all simple to create, unlike the ones in Farrow's The Official Harry Potter Baking Book (2021) or as I like to call it Impossible Things to Attempt with Bread Dough.

Since there are so many recipes, they range from punch (Does anyone serve punch at parties any more? Open bowls of liquid? For the first time, this struck me as the strangest idea.) to snacks to more entree like items, such spaghetti arrranged in a horror themed way. There are several different cupcake ideas, and only one involves fondant.

Good Points

The ingredients are all fairly easy to obtain, which also works in this book's favor, and I appreciated that there were some fairly common foods that were given a spooky twist. I think I need to make the Haunted House Lasagna, which is basically a pasta dish with pesto and alfredo sauce instead of marinara. I may pass on the grapes in mayonaisse, which is a bit like my mother's beloved Waldorf Salad.

There is a clear and helpful photograph with each recipe, which is very helpful when trying to present these dishes. You want to make meat loaf into Brain Loves or turn a pasta dish into Worms and Things Salad, this is the book for you. The only thing that might stop me from buying this is that it is spiral bound, and those don't hold up particularly well in the library. If I were ten and had my own copy of this, I would have wanted to make dinner every night! (But my parents probably wouldn't have wanted to eat it.)