Plan Ahead
Up to 1 Month Before
- Make Bumpy Herbed Breadsticks; store tightly covered in freezer.
- Make Red Velvet Devil's Food Cake; tightly cover and freeze unfrosted cake layers.
The Day Before
- Chill beverages for Cranberry-Apple Spritzer.
- Make Devilishly Good Eggs; store covered in refrigerator.
- Prepare Baked Chicken Wings through step 2; refrigerate.
- Frost the cake.
The Morning Of
- Remove breadsticks from freezer.
About 5 Hours Before Guests Arrive
About 30 Minutes Before Guests Arrive
- Bake chicken wings.
- Toss ingredients for Spinach Ambrosia; wait to drizzle with orange juice.
When Guests Arrive
- Make spritzer.
- Serve appetizers and spritzers.
Before Serving Dinner
- Drizzle salad with orange juice.
Party Guide
Freaky Fun
- Address invitations "Uncostumed individuals need not enter our gate." Or invite guests by phone, complete with eerie-sounding background music.
- Award prizes for costumes; mystery books are a great choice.
- Provide a fortune-teller. (Or do this yourself and think of fortunes ahead of time.)
- Play a murder-mystery game available at game stores.
- Do a reading of the classic frightening poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.
Dramatic Decor
- Greet guests with a lawn decorated with tombstones. Write guests' names above the R.I.P. and add eerie epitaphs to make them shiver. Cereal boxes covered with white butcher paper make terrific tombstones.
- Light the lawn with luminarias.
- Party stores are full of Halloween decor; shop early and choose decorations that suit your party best. Stuff rented costumes or old clothes with newspaper or plastic dry-cleaning bags, and place these extra "guests" throughout the house to promote conversation and merriment.
"Goblin" Food Fun
There's no trick to putting goodies for "goblin" on the table, but here are a few treats you may not have thought of.
- Give scary names to all the menu items, such as Devilishly Good Eggs, and write them on name cards to help set the mood. Embellish the cards with Halloween stickers, jewels or glitter markers.
- Make enough spritzer to serve in a punch bowl. Freeze cranberry juice in plastic gloves (wash and rinse gloves first to remove any residue). When juice is frozen solid, carefully cut off gloves with scissors. Float hands in punch bowl.
- Serve the stew from a witches' cauldron, a large cast-iron pot or a hollowed-out and cleaned pumpkin. Surround the pot with dry ice and water (look for "dry ice" in the Yellow Pages).
- Garnish the stew with a spiderweb of sour cream or squeezeable cheese. To make, squeeze circles of sour cream on top of stew from a squeeze bottle or plastic bag with a corner snipped. Drag a knife through the sour cream from the innermost circle to the outermost one. Repeat dragging from center to edge of pan to create web. Toss in a few gummy candy spiders.
- Squeeze 3 or 4 circles of chocolate sauce onto dessert plates; drag a toothpick from the center of the plate outward through the chocolate circles in 6 to 8 spokes to make a web.
- Place cake slice on web.