Charcuterie Experts Share Their Spookiest Halloween Boards and Tips for Making One Yourself

PEOPLE asked two charcuterie experts how to make scary-good meat and cheese boards this Halloween

Halloween isn’t only about candy.

Decorative meat and cheese plates are all the rage this Halloween. TikTok is flooded with endless spooky inspiration, but turning gruyere into ghosts and mortadella into monsters can seem more daunting than just putting chips in a bowl. PEOPLE spoke to two charcuterie experts to get their tips on making scary-good Halloween-themed boards.

Tara Panasiuk, 33, known as @the_magnolia_mercantile online, has been sharing seasonal DIY projects with her 830,000 social followers for about four years. She thinks outside the board when it comes to making her festive snack spreads, sometimes opting to put the cheese and crackers into miniature cauldrons or on top of jack-o’-lantern-shaped glasses.

“I love to draw people in by how it looks,” Panasiuk tells PEOPLE. “Finding little cute homes for all of the goodies, I love doing that."

When using festive vessels, the lifestyle influencer says that she like to keep the actual food inside more simple. She uses “all basic ingredients” for her charcuterie cauldrons — like cheese cubes, grapes and crackers — but finds little functional and fashionable items to add more flair.

“Instead of just setting out meats, I got little cute toothpicks and put the meats and cheese on just one of those,” she says.

If you'd rather decorate a classic wooden cheese board without vessels, Panasiuk says it's all about taking advantage of the right colors.

For her jack-o'-lantern board, “I just used the regular cutting board and used orange snacks and dark blue snacks for the eyes, nose and mouth — simple as that!" she says.

Dana Berbenich, the owner of Boards by Dana charcuterie store in Bel Air, Md., is known to transform cured meats into skulls and chunks of cheese into Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice characters.

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“One of my passions in this business is teaching people how to do things, and it's always very rewarding for me to make a video that generates a lot of views and that people save and share,” she tells PEOPLE.

“It's not as hard as it looks once you actually get into it,” adds Berbenich, 37, who also teaches classes in-person and online.

If you are intimidating by folding meat and cheese origami, follow Berbenich’s lead with cheese cut-outs. “I always do a brie on a Halloween board because there's so much opportunity to play around with it. So you'll see some with witch hats, bats, mummies, cut into the brie and then filled with jam,” she says.

Berbenich says adding props is probably the easiest way to add festive flair.

“You'll see a lot of mini cauldrons on my boards that I use for the olives and pickles or jams. I use fake spiders, skeleton hands, mini skulls, that kind of thing,” she says.

She also adds edible eyes to olive holes or on top of slices of cheese for a simple spooky upgrade. “If you're afraid to really dig into the design aspect of things or the more intricate detailed things, you could always just lean into that,” she says.

Both Berbenich and Panasiuk say party and craft stores, like Party City and Michael’s, or Amazon are the best places to score the Halloween trinkets.

For tips on what actually belongs on the board, Berbenich suggests leaning into prosciutto “because prosciutto can look like human flesh,” she says with a laugh. Blackberries, wine-soaked cheeses and other darker-colored items are also a good idea. In general, she likes to incorporate four cheeses, at least two meats, a salty-sweet crunchy item and three types of fresh fruit on each board.

“My approach is always to select ingredients that have a nice variety of flavor, texture, both in your mouth and visually, and then color as well. When it comes to a regular board, I'm really looking to build in lots of color," says Berbenich. "But actually when it comes to a Halloween board, I like to lean to the darker side."

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