Halloween Dinner Doesn't Get Easier Than This Ghost and Spider Pan Pizza

In the past week, I've brought you recipes for vampire mouth sandwich cookies and bloody witch finger shortbread cookies—two sweet, spooky ways to celebrate Halloween. But what about the rest of your meal?

Say hello to our ghost pizza, with a side of spiders. Inspired by this adorable pie, it's more trick than recipe—even though I opted for Kenji's Foolproof Pan Pizza, you can easily get the same visual effect using a store-bought dough or even a flatbread if you're pressed for time. All you'll need is some kind of base, a little under a cup of pizza sauce (I used a jar of Rao's), some fresh mozzarella, pitted black olives, and a few sprigs of rosemary.

I began by slicing my mozzarella into 1/4-inch rounds, using a ghost-shaped cookie cutter to get the shapes you see in the photos. That's the lazy route, but it wouldn't be much trouble to hand-cut the mozzarella into ghoulish figures with a sharp paring knife if you're so inclined. As for those creepy crawly spiders, I simply poked both sides of the olives with a four-tine fork and stuck a single rosemary leaf into each hole.

Once everything was prepped, I baked the crust with a layer of tomato sauce and the olive spiders, until the dough was cooked through and the rosemary had darkened and curled into little legs—about 12-15 minutes if you're making a pan pizza in a 550°F oven. Then, I loaded on the ghost-shaped mozzarella and stuck the pie back into the oven until the mozzarella began to melt, approximately one minute. The finishing touch is plunking chopped slivers of olives onto each ghost for eyes.

And...that's it! One Halloween pizza, fresh outta the oven.