Despite all the candy and colorfully wrapped cakes and cookies at the grocery store, Halloween isn’t really a culinary celebration, especially compared to the big hits like Thanksgiving. Since I’m training to be a long-distance runner, I don’t have as much room on my plate for a bag of Twix anyway. I can say that I had a hard time getting excited about Halloween until the creepy charcuterie boards came my way.

A friend of mine sent me an Instagram reel from Petal & Platter that featured some seriously alarming but clever ways to dress up a meat and cheese platter for Halloween. (Brie cheese Pennywise, the clown from Stephen King’s It, is almost too much to watch.) After I got over my initial creepy clown reaction, I was inspired. Maybe there is hope for Halloween as a food holiday. At the very least, it can be a hearty snack holiday.

I saw a few patterns in the Petal & Platter charcuterie and cheese boards. The key is to have one big, central creepy item. To give a few examples from her platter, maybe it’s a skull with olive features, the face of the Scream mask with a black hood, or the creepy face of Pennywise with pepperoni hair.

The other pattern I saw is that you’ll probably want to use brie cheese to make that centerpiece. Brie comes in flat circles, rather than wedges or rectangles, which gives you more of a flat surface to work with. The cheese has a white rind, which makes it a great canvas for using jam as “ink” to draw details. It’s soft but not lacking in integrity, so you can easily cut a general shape out of the wheel without it cracking. I recommend opting for double cream brie; triple cream can get a little gooey once cut.