Gluten-Free Halloween Treats: Layered Ice Cream &“Spooky Eyes” (Baked Chicken Meatballs)

Halloween is the ultimate holiday in my books. I love wearing costumes, carving pumpkins, lighting fireworks, decorating our apartment, trick-or-treating, eating copious amounts of chocolate and candy, and the list just goes on from there! This was my first Halloween eating gluten-free and soy-free so I needed to rethink the candy and chocolate situation a little. I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat much of the store bought stuff, but what fun, Halloween-themed items could I make for myself instead? Here’s what I came up with…

“Spooky Eyes” are a fun meatball appetizer I developed using sliced black olives over melted mozzarella cheese to make them look like ghoulish eyeballs. These meatballs were super easy to make and they looked and tasted great. Here’s my simple recipe if you want to make them yourself.

“Spooky Eyes”: Ghoulish, Gluten-Free Baked Chicken Meatballs

For the meatballs:
850 grams ground chicken (you could also use ground turkey, beef or pork too)
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup minced fresh basil
1 medium onion, minced
1 small can tomato paste (5.50z / 156 ml)
1/2 cup ground Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon salt
pepper to taste

For the topping:
1 – 2 cups tomato sauce
grated mozzarella cheese
1 can sliced black olives

1. In a large bowl, combine ground chicken with all of the meatball ingredients listed above. I made sure my onions, garlic and basil were finely minced by running all of them through my food processor first. Mix ingredients together until they are evenly combined.

2. Shape mixture into evenly sized meatballs and bake them in the oven at 425 F until they are cooked and start to brown (about 15-20 minutes depending on your oven).

3. Remove the tray of cooked meatballs from the oven and allow them to cool slightly (enough to work without burning yourself). Once ready, spoon a dollop of tomato sauce directly onto each meatball.

4. Top each meatball with a handful of grated mozzarella cheese. Arrange the pieces of cheese so that they will melt into a solid white shape easily.

5. Top each meatball with a good slice of black olive to make it look like an eyeball. If you wish, you can set the olive slices off-centre to make them look cross-eyed.

6. Return the meatballs to the oven and bake for 5-10 more minutes, until the cheese has melted solid. Serve warm.

Layered Ice Cream

I also had my first foray into the world of layered ice cream this Halloween. I saw a photo of it in a cooking magazine and Halloween was the perfect excuse to try it. These tasty treats were also very easy to make. However, they did require a lot of time and patience to pull them off successfully.

I used disposable plastic wine glasses as the ice cream dishes since I didn’t have any glass ones. I used store-bought vanilla and mango ice cream, and some gluten-free and soy-free chocolate sauce. I let the mango ice cream melt a bit, then I pressed spoonfuls into the bottom of the cups trying to fill in all the gaps. I let them sit out on the counter until the layer leveled out a bit before putting them into the freezer to chill.

Many hours later I added the chocolate sauce layer, but here’s where I screwed up. I had put the little ice creams into our mini-freezer before, and they weren’t actually as frozen as I had thought. I had to heat the chocolate sauce up a bit to get it to pour smoothly and once the warm chocolate sauce hit the semi-frozen ice cream it sank straight to the bottom of the cup. I ruined quite a few this way before pulling the plug on the chocolate sauce operation. I cleared some space in our regular freezer and froze the cups over night. The next day when I added the warm chocolate sauce layer it settled perfectly. Time and patience are truly the key to this dish.

After the chocolate sauce layer had sufficiently frozen, I microwaved a big dish of vanilla ice cream to make it a liquid. I filled up the cups with the remaining vanilla layer and chilled them for a few more hours. The results, at least in the cups where I re-froze the mango again, were nice flat layers of ice cream with a gooey chocolate sauce layer in the middle. If you have the time, I highly recommend making these next Halloween!