This Halloween cheese ball is a fun and delicious appetizer to serve at a Halloween, Thanksgiving, or game day celebration.
This pumpkin-shaped cheese ball is mildly spicy and delicious on your favorite cracker or crudité, such as celery or carrot sticks. I love this cheese spread on buttery crackers such as Ritz.
Bring this cheese ball to your next fall-themed party. It's super easy to make with readily available ingredients.
Blend all of the ingredients together, form them into a ball, and coat it with crushed nacho cheese Doritos.
You can blend all of the ingredients together with a spoon, a food processor, or an electric mixer, whichever you prefer.
Ingredients and Tips:
You'll need softened cream cheese, shredded cheddar cheese (you can use preshredded or grate it yourself), and a few add-ins such as pico de gallo, cumin, onion, minced jalapeño, and a little Worcestershire or soy sauce.
To coat the cheese ball, I used crushed nacho cheese Doritos, but I imagine that crushed Cheetos would work too. If you'd like to go for the Jack Skellington look, you could substitute white corn tortilla chips and then stencil on the face with bits of black olive, black sesame seeds, or even nori (dried seaweed) sheets that you can cut into shapes.
I used some black olives to form the eyes of a jack-o-lantern.
If you normally don't keep Doritos in your snack cupboard, you can just buy a single serving bag just for this purpose. They usually sell them by the check-out counter or at lunch counters.
Chilling the cheese after mixing it will usually help firm it up and make it easy to form into a ball, but if your mixture is a little too creamy, you can mix a couple of teaspoons of Instant Clear Jel (a pie thickener) into the cheese and it will firm up right away. Another option is to mix a little cornstarch with the Worcestershire sauce before adding it to the cheese.
Be sure to press any extra liquids out of the minced onions, pico de gallo, and minced jalapeño.
Top it with the stem from a bell pepper (any color bell pepper will work). To get the ridges in the side of the cheese ball, I used a skewer and pressed it against the sides. You could also use a blunt knife to create the indentations.
Just be sure to allow enough time for the cheese ball to chill and firm up after shaping.
Make-Ahead
You can make this appetizer up to three days in advance and keep it, covered, in the refrigerator. Leftovers also keep very well in the fridge.
For a great Halloween-themed spread, add chocolate-peanut butter spider bites, mini mummy dogs, Halloween deviled eggs, and mini mummy pizzas to your buffet table.
Add a Satan's Whiskers cocktail for the grownups too.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!
Welcome to 2023’s #HalloweenTreatsWeek event!
If you're new here, Welcome! If you're a returning haunt, welcome back!
#HalloweenTreatsWeek is a yearly Halloween blogging event that is hosted by Angie from Big Bear’s Wife . You'll find that this fun and spooky event is an online, week-long event that is filled with some frightfully fun Halloween treats and recipes from some fantastic Halloween loving bloggers!
For this years 6th annual #HalloweenTreatsWeek event we have 18 hauntingly talented bloggers that are sharing their favorite Halloween recipes throughout the week! You can following the hashtag #HalloweenTreatsWeek on social media to collect all of these frightful recipes to use at your own Halloween parties and events!
Make Sure to check out all of the fun Halloween recipes that we're sharing this week!
Today's Halloween Offerings:
- Halloween Puppy Chow from The Spiffy Cookie
- Halloween Cheese Ball from Karen's Kitchen Stories
- Bubbling Cauldron Caramel Apples from The Redhead Baker
- Air Fryer Bloody Intestines Cinnamon Rolls from It’s Shanaka
- Spiderweb Pretzels from For the Love of Food
Halloween Cheese Ball
Ingredients
- 8 ounce brick cream cheese, softened to room temperature
- 6 ounces (1 1/2 cups) shredded cheddar cheese
- 3 tablespoons minced onion
- 2 tablespoons pico de gallo, drained
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/2 medium jalapeño, minced
- 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
- 2 teaspoons Instant Clear Jel or corn starch
- 1 1/2 ounces (about 1 cup) nacho cheese Doritos, crushed
- 1 bell pepper stem
Instructions
- Mix the cheeses together thoroughly. Add the onions, pico de gallo, cumin, and jalapeño, and stir to combine thoroughly.
- Add the Worcestershire sauce and optional thickener and cover with plastic wrap in a bowl and refrigerate for about two to three hours.
- With your hands, form the cheese mixture into a ball and coat it with the crushed Doritos. Insert the bell pepper stem on top.
- Optionally, use a skewer or butter knife to etch in the pumpkin indentations.
- Chill, covered, for an hour and up to two or three days.
Nutrition Facts
Calories
225Fat (grams)
19 gSat. Fat (grams)
10 gCarbs (grams)
8 gFiber (grams)
1 gNet carbs
7 gSugar (grams)
3 gProtein (grams)
7 gCholesterol (grams)
50 mg
I love the flavors in this cheeseball. Coating it in Doritos is so much fun and so is the stem!
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