The Most Googled Halloween Foods Of 2023

No Halloween party is complete without costumes and a selection of Instagrammably creepy, gory foods to both delight and disgust your guests. With the holiday just around the corner, Google Trends has released its annual Halloween Frightgeist online portal, featuring a massive roundup of the most popular seasonal Google searches.

Although much of the Frightgeist site is focused on the most popular costumes, there's been no shortage of Google queries for Halloween food ideas and cocktail recipes. Here's what everyone wants on their party menus this year.

Prepping for a monster bash? The key is apparently to make literally everything spooky. Per Google, the top trending recipes included "spooky pasta salad," "spooky cinnamon rolls," and "spooky margarita."

You might be wondering what makes any of these foods spooky, and the answer seems to be unconventional color schemes. Your average pasta salad probably looks golden or beige, but a spooky one, like this one from A Magical Mess or this one from Smile Sandwich, includes black and/or purple food coloring in the ingredients list. (Why not just use squid ink pasta, folks?) A search for "spooky cinnamon rolls," meanwhile, might feature recipes designed to look like "guts" by arranging red velvet cinnamon roll dough. For more squeamish bakers, there are always tamer recipes for bright orange cinnamon rolls with a black interior.

Even without the word "spooky" in the name, people are looking for gore. "Lychee eyeballs" and "Bloody balls" were the top two trending Halloween recipes on Google this year. Whole lychees filled with jam and blueberries are a simple recipe to pull off, and visually, it's hard to keep your own eyeballs off them. The same can be said for "bloody balls," but it might help to be more specific in your search. A quick Google of "Halloween bloody balls recipe" will yield anything from cake pop recipes to Smoky Bloody Meatballs.

The popularity of mummified treats also increased this year. In 2022, "mummy hot dogs" was a breakout search term, meaning searches for the food increased by more than 5,000% within the given timeframe. In 2023, searches for both "mummy cake pops" and "mummy hot dogs" increased significantly, by 500% and 250%, respectively. Here are some ideas for how to have fun with a can of crescent roll dough at Halloween, beyond mummy hot dogs.

Much to this writer's discomfort, spider-themed foods have also risen in popularity since last year. After taking second place among all trending Halloween foods in 2022, "Spider web taco dip" was the breakout search term for the 2023 Halloween season. "Pretzel spider webs" also ranked fourth in trending Halloween recipe searches. Thankfully, pretzel spider webs appear to be more sweet and salty than creepy and crawly.

Sober October might be somewhat of a trend among Gen Z, but Google's search trends for Halloween didn't have any shortage of boozy queries in 2023. "Witches brew," "Candy corn shot," "Syringe jello shot," "Zombie drink," and "Black jello" were the top trending Halloween cocktail searches this year.

There are plenty of recipes out there for a Witches Brew cocktail, but it's more likely that searches for this term are referring to Witches Brew wine, made by Leelanau Cellars. Mixed in among the recipes on TikTok, Witches Brew wine has gone viral, inspiring countless people to flock to Trader Joe's, where bottles are sold seasonally.

The most unique cocktail search tucked in among Google's Halloween trends, though, is the Zombie drink. An initial search for the phrase yields recipes for a surprisingly tropical Zombie Cocktail, which contains three different rums (Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and 151-proof). The originator of the drink did allegedly limit the cocktail to only two per person, as too many could make you "like the walking dead." Either way, the scariest part about this drink is definitely how much liquor it contains, and how much it would cost to make a batch for a crowd.