You can find all of our BONUS Educational Cooking Activities & Holiday Recipes right here!
Happy (early) Halloween!! It’s a spooky Sunday cooking activity to make Halloween themed pizzas, including a pre-filled shopping cart and ideas for decorating your pizzas to look like pumpkins, mummies, or even spiderwebs!
Halloween-themed Pizzas
We know how stressful it can be trying to get out the door for trick or treating, and making sure that everyone has eaten (before or after) traipsing around the neighborhood. Take our One Potato Homemade Pizza Sauce, pair it with some tips and tricks for prepping ahead of time, and you’re ready to haunt the neighborhood in style. (Our sauce freezes well, or you can opt for your favorite store-bought any time.)
You can gather your ingredients and assemble your whole pizzas a few days in advance, the morning of, or immediately when you want to eat them. If you’re making your Halloween-themed pizzas on English muffins, you can even make these in the air fryer to shave a few minutes off cooking time.
Quick Assemble – Use a Pre-Made Base
- Make naan-bread pizzas using frozen or fresh naan. Pre-heat your naan, flipping to heat evenly, before topping with cheese and other toppings. These can be assembled and baked quickly the day of trick-or-treating.
- English muffin or bagel pizzas – These small, personal-sized pizzas can be decorated quickly and baked immediately since you don’t have to wait for the dough to cook. They’re the perfect size and shape for pizza mummies, pizza pumpkins, monster faces, or even zombies.
To Bake and Serve:
- Preheat oven to 400°F.
- Pre-heat your base (naan or English muffins) for a few minutes, both sides for naan, single-side for English muffins.
- Assemble your Halloween-themed bite-sized pizzas.
- Bake for ~5 minutes, or until cheese is melted, reaching your desired level of done-ness.
Make Ahead & Bake From Refrigerated or Frozen
If you want a fun pizza-making activity, but want to save time on Halloween day, you can make your pizzas ahead of time and refrigerate or freeze them until you’re ready to pop them in the oven. Here are our pro tips for assembling and then freezing your pizzas, so they taste fresh and delicious, and you can have your Halloween pizzas ready in less than 20 minutes before heading out for trick-or-treating:
- Par-bake the crust: This can help the pizza keep its shape while frozen and speed the time to cook when you are ready. Before you assemble your pizza, partially bake the crust at 450°F for 4 to 5 minutes, then let cool completely. Now you’re ready to assemble your Halloween pizza mummies!
- Double wrap: After decorating your Halloween pizzas, wrap the pizza in plastic wrap, then aluminum foil to protect it from freezer burn and drying out.
- Freeze flat: You can freeze the pizza flat in a Ziploc bag or on a cookie sheet.
If you’re going to be consuming your pizzas within 3 days, no need to freeze them, but you still need to par-bake the crust before assembling. Double-wrap and keep flat in the fridge.
To Heat and Serve:
- Preheat oven to 450°F. Preheat a baking sheet by placing it in the oven as it heats (or use a pizza stone if you have one).
- Unwrap your frozen pizza.
- Bake for 12-15 minutes or until golden brown, reaching your desired done-ness.
Pro Tip I: If you’re rolling out pizza dough from the fridge, remember to remove the dough from the fridge anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours before you’re ready to build your pizzas. The more time the dough has at room temp, the more flexible and easier it will be to roll out. If you’re using frozen pizza dough, remove pizza dough from the freezer and place it in the refrigerator one day before using.
Pro Tip II: When assembling homemade pizzas, remember not to overcrowd with too many toppings, and make sure your veggies and other toppings are not soggy.
Red Sauce or Green Sauce?
Instead of using pizza sauce as a base, switch it up and use pesto sauce instead! When we think about Halloween colors, we picture Zombies, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Witches with green skin or accent coloring. Get creative by making a green-skinned monster face with pesto as a base for your pizza, adding as much shredded mozzarella cheese as you would like, and having fun using toppings to create your monster face.
Even though cheddar cheese is a less traditional flavored cheese to use on a pizza, it still tastes great! You can use red pizza sauce as a base, cheddar cheese for your orange pumpkin, and cut out some pepperoni (traditional, turkey, or vegan-style!) as your carved pumpkin face.
One Potato Pizza Sauce Recipe – or your favorite store-bought brand
One Potato Chia Seed Pesto – or your favorite store-bought brand
Halloween Toppings
- Use shredded cheddar cheese to make orange pumpkin pizzas
- Pepperoni is easy to carve into different shapes to use as teeth, eyebrows, or even the shape of stitches
- Instead of using shredded cheese, you can layer thicker strips of string cheese to look like bandages for mummies
- You can use sliced bell peppers as mouths or for the shape of eyes, while using sliced olives for the irises on larger pizzas
- Cut out small triangles of red pepper for the tongue or fangs dripping with “blood”
- Thin strips of mozzarella arranged in a web pattern make a great spider web, with black olives halved to create a spider body and slices for legs
MIX & MATCH INGREDIENTS
We’ve compiled a list of ingredients to fill your grocery cart for easy check-out. Remember to select your store, add the quantity to your cart, and you’re good to go – it’s that quick.
- 1 lb pizza dough (should make 1-2 pizzas, or 4 small personal sized pizzas)
- English muffins
- naan bread
- mozzarella cheese sticks
- shredded mozzarella cheese
- shredded cheddar cheese
- green olives
- black olives
- pepperoni
- turkey Pepperoni
- vegetarian Pepperoni
- red bell pepper
- green bell pepper
- mushrooms