Up The Spooky-Factor On Grazing Boards With Easy Charcuterie Skulls

Adulthood marks the moment we stop trick-or-treating during Halloween and start throwing parties instead. Instead of the usual spread with boring charcuterie ingredients give your party food a boost by adding edible skulls to your meat and cheese platters. A reel by Instagram creator @ainttooproudtomeg shows just how to do it.

The spooky charcuterie additions can be made using skull ice cube trays or baking molds. For our purposes, we'll be using them for meat. After spraying with nonstick spray, line the mold with slices of thin, hardy deli meat like prosciutto or salami, and then you can add a filling such as cream cheese, other charcuterie meats, or even fruit like diced cantaloupe. Make sure the deli meats are long enough to cover the filling, and then refrigerate the molds until the charcuterie meat skull is sturdy. With a soft filling like cheese, guests can slice off a piece and spread it directly onto crackers.

To complete the scene (and if your skull needs some extra help staying together) you can stick a Halloween skull toothpick in it. If the skull mold is big enough, you can clean it and fill it with a bone-colored snack like popcorn or white chocolate pretzels elsewhere on your party's food table.

For a Halloween grazing board decoration that takes slightly less preparation, you can always build a charcuterie board skull the opposite way. Instead of using a mold, you can take a plastic skull decoration and build around that by disinfecting the skull and wrapping prosciutto around it until it's covered. This version isn't fully edible, beyond if peckish guests pull the salami off the skull — which sounds morbid — but it does make for a creepy centerpiece. If there's room, stick some gummy eyeballs into the sockets for added effect, and then fill in the charcuterie board around the skull.

Another skeletal-themed charcuterie board doesn't require buying extra Halloween decorations. In this method, your canvas is a thick cheese like brie or white cheddar. Instead of dicing it into cubes, freeze it for just a little while to make it tougher, and then carefully use a knife or fork to slice the cheese into a simple skull shape. You can shape the brie into simple ghost shapes too. If you like, many folks who go this route also add a dark jam, like blueberry, in the middle of the brie to add "shadows" to the eye sockets, nose, and mouth.