Complimentary spirits were provided for my Halloween cocktails. The alcohol kind, not the ghostly kind. 😉

As you can see, I’ve been very busy today with my Halloween cocktails! I had a sudden burst of inspiration recently and scribbled down a bunch of ideas for fun, spooky drinks I could create. I absolutely love making fun food and drinks for Halloween – there’s something about it that really brings out my elaborate, ambitious side. I’m sure my neighbors wondered why I spent an hour in the driveway photographing candy corn this afternoon! 😉

Since I created several different drinks and shots, I decided to split all the recipes into separate posts so that you wouldn’t have to scroll through one endless post. For ease of reference, I’m assembling them all here so that you can easily refer back to all the spooktacular sips:

Halloween Cocktails

• Halloween Pudding Shots
• Berry Goth Orange & Blackberry Cocktail
• Monster Absinthe Cocktail

Lucid Absinthe was provided for this creepy cocktail!

When it comes to spooky cocktails, it doesn’t get much more goth than absinthe. So I was pleased to get a bottle of Lucid Absinthe in the mail, because I’d been inspired by the myriad macabre pudding cups all over Pinterest to create a grown-up version.

Lucid Absinthe is especially perfect for Halloween because of the black bottle with big green eyes. This is the second time in my life that I’ve had absinthe – the first was when Jai and I had a flight layover in Amsterdam for a few hours in 2009 and I bought a small bottle of “Van Gogh Absinthe” as a souvenir.

This is a very simple cocktail to make, so it’d be perfect for a Halloween party if you’re looking for something a little simpler than, say, candy corn shots. First, you’ll want to get a set of clear plastic cups and a Sharpie. Draw whatever creepy faces you want on the front of the cup, then grab a bowl and pour in a small quantity of lemon juice – just enough to dip the top of the cup in. Then, you’ll want to add sugar to another small bowl, squeeze in a few drops of green food coloring and stir with a spoon to create neon green sugar. Dip your glass straight from the lemon juice to the sugar to create a fun green rim.

To create the drink itself, I just followed the instructions on Lucid Absinthe’s website for the traditional preparation: Add 1.5 oz of absinthe to your cup, then hold a slotted spoon over it – I didn’t rest the spoon on the cup as you normally do because it would have taken off the sugar coating – and add a cube of sugar to the spoon, if desired. Then pour cold water over the sugar to dissolve and fill the remainder of the cup. Done!

Sobieski Vodka provided complimentary spirits for me to create my Halloween pudding shots.

I love Halloween, and I’m well known for my epic parties and spooky food. From rat-shaped meatloaf to cheeseball bats, I’ve whipped up all kinds of creations over the years! I’ve been having a lot of fun making specialty drinks recently, so I sat down and brainstormed some ideas for Halloween cocktails. As I mulled over ideas, I had a sudden flash of inspiration: Candy Corn Pudding Shots! I’ve been wanting to try my hand at pudding shots for a while, and I had a vision of layering puddings in a clear cup to create a candy corn effect. Here’s what I ended up with!

These are delicious! Unlike standard Jell-O shots, you’ll want to eat these with a spoon. Different pudding shot recipes recommend different things for storage – some say fridge and some say freezer, so I tried it both ways. When the shots are frozen, they become almost like an ice cream – I think this is my favorite way to eat them. It seemed to me that the alcohol flavor was less sharp when eating the frozen shot, although my taste buds may have been numbed from taste-testing a refrigerated shot first. 😉

In all, I was pretty happy with how these turned out. The middle layer didn’t turn out orange enough for my liking – I used butterscotch pudding only because it was the most “Orange” pudding I could find. I wonder if pudding shots could be mixed with standard Jell-O shots? If so, a straight-up Orange Jell-O would probably look better. This was my first attempt at making these, so it was an experiment as it so often is here at the Cooking Catastrophe kitchen!

Be warned, these are a little time-consuming to layer and require possibly more patience than I have. Because the technique is clearer to illustrate visually than to write, I shot a quick and dirty video while I was making these. This was totally unscripted as I had no plans of v-logging, as you can tell by my messy hair and kitchen! I’m not trying to compete with the Food Network here – think of it as hanging out in the kitchen with a friend while they show you a shortcut:

Since this recipe uses more vanilla pudding than the butterscotch, I found myself with a surplus of orange-tinted pudding shots. So I got a little bonus “Recipe” out of it:

Taking inspiration from these Frankenstein pudding cups, I drew pumpkin faces on the front of the snack cups, and poured the remainder of the butterscotch pudding in them. Remember, I was just using up a surplus of pudding from the first recipe, so these don’t taste like pumpkin – they’re just decorated to look like pumpkins. The first comment in the pudding shot recipe I adapted mentions pumpkin pie shots, so you could easily adapt this idea for pumpkin-flavored, pumpkin-face shots – which is way easier than the candy corn shots and looks just as cute, so this may have been the winning idea from today’s test kitchen!

Have you ever made pudding shots?