The Best Halloween Baking Shows To Stream This Season

The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell sets the bar for spooky baking shows. Though the show only lasted one season, the show was a delightful blend of dark (very dark) humor, crafts, and whimsical baked creations. It was like a weird, goth At Home With Amy Sedaris, but instead of guests like Bridget Everett, there were Muppets (yes, actual Muppets, the show was co-produced by Henson Alternative) like Rose, a reanimated raccoon who was once crushed to death by a truck. What’s not to love?

Stream The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell On Netflix

Halloween Baking Championship is like the flagship of the Food Network’s Halloween shows. Now in it’s 8th season, the show (which premiered its current season on September 12 on the Food Network, but is also available on Discovery+ on demand) pits twelve individual bakers against one another to battle it out in weekly baking competitions to see who can craft the most beautiful, and most delicious baked goods.

Stream Halloween Baking Championship on Discovery+

Halloween Wars is another competition series that airs on Food Network and is also available to stream on Discovery+. Teams comprised of bakers, pumpkin carvers, confectioners, and more battle it out to create magical and majorly impressive Halloween-themed displays, while guest judges, including legends like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and cast members from The Walking Dead and Stranger Things weigh in on their creations.

Stream Halloween Wars Now

If chilled dough is your thing, Food Network’s Halloween Cookie Challenge is the show for you. Expert chef Jet Tila and star baker Rosanna Pansino host this six-episode show that brings together four of the country’s best cookie makers to compete for a $10,000 prize as they try to design and decorate cookies with spooky themes like body parts, spooky silhouettes, and graveyard scenes.

Stream The Halloween Cookie Challenge Now

Season 7 of Nailed It! premiered on October 5, and since it happened to drop right before Halloween, all four episodes have themes appropriate for this creepy, crawly time of year. The challenges include a “Halloween Dance Fight Cake” and an alien autopsy cake, and thanks to the hilarity of host Nicole Byer (who embraces the holiday by spending the season fully in costume), this is definitely the funniest baking show out there this year.

Stream Nailed It! Season 7 Now

Vivian Chan and Zac Young host this competition show that pits three teams of bakers against each other to create the most inspiring and impressive cakes with creepy, mystical, or magical themes. Perhaps most impressive of all though is that these cakes have all been constructed with special features so they light up, emit flames, and blow smoke when it comes time for their big unveiling.

Stream Halloween Freakshow Cakes on Discovery+

If you thought that gingerbread was only suitable for making houses, think again. Food Network’s Haunted Gingerbread Showdown features bakers who construct whimsical trees and forests, Beetlejuice-inspired dioramas, and of course, some of the most impressive gingerbread houses you’ve ever seen. But since it’s a Halloween show, these are all spooky-themed bakes, and there’s terror baked into every last detail.

Stream Haunted Gingerbread Showdown on Discovery+

Back in 2012, Charlize Theron starred as the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Huntsman. As a promotion for the film, she appeared on an episode of Top Chef season 9, in which the cheftestants were instructed to cook a grisly, bloody meal befitting of an evil queen. It was one of the show’s most bonkers episodes, in that almost everything served to Theron was prepared using some element of animal blood or guts, and there was one especially horrific black chicken foot served with a quail egg, meant to represent “the baby that was inside her when she got slaughtered.” I mean, what is this, House of the Dragon? (Okay, so this entry wasn’t about baking, but I added it here because if you’re talking about creepy cooking, the use of real blood and innards makes this show a worthwhile addition to the list.

Stream Top Chef Season 9 Now on Peacock

Ace Of Cakes star Duff Goldman serves as host of this cake-baking series on the Food Network (now streaming on Discovery+). And since Duff is known for his incredibly detailed, outlandish cakes, he obviously had high expectations for the contestants on this Halloween-themed show. Episodes feature the bakers creating cakes using unusual ingredients like blood oranges, forbidden rice and black garlic (and even worse: candy corn… shudder), and making cakes that look like they’re rotting or infested. This cake baking contest is not for the faint of heart.

Stream Halloween Cake-Off on Discovery+

A few years back, VH1 did the world a favor when it debuted Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party. The pairing of real-life friends Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg was a match made in heaven as the two seemingly disparate lifestyle gurus combined forces for a show that was part talk show, part cooking series. In their 2021 Halloween special, produced this time around by Peacock, the two team up with Buzzfeed’s Tasty editor Alvin Zhou to judge teams of bakers who were tasked with creating huge, haunted baked goods for a party thrown by Martha and Snoop.

Stream Snoop & Martha's Very Tasty Halloween on Peacock