By Madyson Muresan
Co-Arts & Culture Editor

The Mistress of the Dark has just bewitched this spooky season with her new “Cookbook from Hell”. The goth icon, Elvira, has published a cookbook on September 30, featuring many frighteningly fun recipes for your own Halloween party.

Elvira’s Cookbook from Hell book cover. Photo by Madyson Muresan

Cassandra Peterson adopted the persona of Elvira in 1981 when she became the hostess of a local horror movie show, “Elvira’s Movie Macabre”. Her large hairdo, low-cut dress with a hip-length slit, ghostly pale skin, drag-esque gothic makeup, and her unabashedly flamboyant self became legendary. She quickly became a hit on air and later starred in her own movies, including “Elvira: Mistress of the Dark” in 1988 and “Elvira’s Haunted Hills” in 2001. 

While this cookbook takes on more of a Halloween theme, Peterson includes recipes that can be made year-round. The book contains mostly household or easy-to-find ingredients, which makes the recipes cheaper to cook. The instructions are primarily easy to understand, but long paragraphs make it easy to skip a step accidentally. 

Bone-Chilling Berry Bundt. Photo by Gabe Elmosleh

Bone-Chilling Berry Bundt

This cake is a classic white with powdered strawberries and an assortment of berries mixed into the batter. After the cake is cooled, a blackberry reduction glaze is dripped over top.

Reading the instructions for this recipe is a bit of a study. Writing down each step on another piece of paper to refer to while baking, to avoid searching through a large paragraph to find my place, proved helpful. 

This dish was definitely one of the more difficult recipes to make, as there were many different ingredients and steps in curating the dish. Most of my plight comes from buying and pulverizing the dried strawberries that this recipe calls for. The dried strawberries were expensive, and this step took longer than expected. The batter and glaze were easy to make, but I would recommend making double the glaze per cake. In the cookbook, the picture of the cake has a lot more glaze than one serving provides.

The biggest issue with this recipe overall would be the time it takes to cook the cake. This recipe calls for the cake to be baked at 350°F for one hour and 25 minutes. I cooked it for an hour, and when I went to take it out, it was overdone but not burnt. Ultimately, this was a user error, as I should have checked on the cake more often. Repeatedly checking on a cake baking in the oven is crucial to making sure the cake is not overdone. To check if a cake is done, stick a toothpick or wooden skewer into the center of the cake, as you remove the toothpick, there should be some crumbs sticking, but no wet batter. 

Toxic Waste Mac ‘N’ Cheese. Photo by Madyson Muresan

Toxic Waste Mac ‘N’ Cheese

This dish is a classic mac ‘n’ cheese using cavatappi pasta and white cheddar cheese, whole milk and spinach for the sauce. The final step of baking the pasta in a deep dished pan gives it that extra sear—perfect for a dinner party. 

This recipe was shockingly easy to make and was by far my favorite to make. It is creamy, tasty and a bit healthy. The instructions for this recipe were easy to read with clear instructions. There aren’t too many steps, and all ingredients can be found at any grocery store.

To get the green coloring of the mac ‘n’ cheese, this recipe uses blended spinach in the sauce, which adds fiber and is a healthy alternative to artificial food dye. The pasta it recommends using is cavatappi, which is the perfect choice, as the hollow spiral shape of the pasta allows the sauce to enter and make each bite flavorful. 

Brownie Recluse. Photo by Madyson Muresan

Brownie Recluse

This dish is a classic brownie recipe but with added spices that deepen the cocoa flavor and make it very rich. The chocolate chips added throughout the batter give it that rich chocolate consistency. The marshmallow webs overtop are purely decorative, but do slightly cut through the rich chocolate.

This recipe was the most tedious out of the three because it required steps that are not common in brownie recipes. The instructions were clear, but still needed careful examination.

It was easy to make, but there was one ingredient that I was unable to find in any of my local grocery stores: ancho chile powder. This ingredient would’ve been used to deepen and accentuate the cocoa flavor, making the brownies richer. I found that the cinnamon and cayenne pepper in the recipe accomplished the same objective, and that ancho chile powder was unneeded.

As a whole, this dish was all I could’ve asked for and more. It was rich, chocolatey, soft, and crispy all in one. The marshmallows added a nice touch to the festivity of these brownies, making them perfect for Halloween. I found that they only added to the visuals of the brownies and not the taste, making this recipe adaptable to every occasion. 

This book pushes the boundary of what goes into a simple brownie recipe and toes the line between visually appetizing and downright stomach-churning. Many of these recipes can easily be used for parties of all sizes, bringing people together to share the joy of this spooky season. That is really what this whole book is about: celebrating what makes us unique or quirky with friends and family. This cookbook is worth the buy to truly make your Halloween party spook-tacular.