Several years ago, Darryl Ray's company catered a Halloween party for a tech firm. The client wanted people to have some fun with their food, and chose a gross-out theme. "They wanted the buffet to look like a human body," says Ray, co-owner of The Butler Did It Catering Co. So his staff hollowed out baguettes and placed them on the table in the shape of mangled arms and legs, and suitably shaped bread for the head and torso. Inside the bread, they put gruesome-looking dishes–spaghetti and pasta to look like intestines and innards, biscotti to imitate splayed fingers, and sushi for eyeballs.

"It looked neat," Ray relates to the Straight, on the line from his Vancouver office. People were tickled by it, but in the end, as Ray initially suspected, it was a little too realistic. "Everyone was interested, but not interested in eating it."

Halloween is perhaps the only occasion when we're encouraged to play with our food. It's the mother of all theme parties, one that's built for kids but embraced by legions of adults at house parties. However, there's a danger in taking gruesome too far.

"I would just warn people [about] crossing a line between making it too gross and still wanting people to eat it," Ray says. "You get to a point where it ends up just being gross.”¦It defeats the purpose of having the food there."

Just the thought of some Halloween fare can turn you off your lunch. Picture this: an oozing bowl of blood clots dotted with pus. This recipe comes from Nigella Lawson's Feast: Food That Celebrates Life (Knopf, 2006), along with other intentionally revolting Halloween creations, which she assures the reader will delight children. The clots are made of a mix of strawberry, raspberry, and blackcurrant jelly, and the pus from lime jelly set with milk. "It is hideously, fabulously realistic," Lawson writes of the pus, which together with the clots evokes "an attractive burst-boil appearance".

Ray acknowledges that kids have a higher tolerance for disgusting realism than adults. "Kids don't get grossed out as much. In fact, sometimes the grosser the better," he says, so incorporating novelty sweets like worm cupcakes into kids' parties isn't a bad idea. "It tends to be candy that you're doing it with, so they get over the grossness pretty quickly.”¦You can put a gummy worm in anything and a kid will eat it."

Adults aren't as easily convinced, though. "We're very visual people; it's all connected for food," he says. "I recommend trying to keep it somewhat normal."

That doesn't mean it can't be fun. Ray advises "taking some standard stuff and giving it a nasty name. It still keeps it appetizing, and doesn't make it too terribly gross." He gives the example of serving Cajun blackened chicken skewers, with a sign labelling them "burned fingers". Everybody recognizes the popular cocktail-party item for what it is, but the name gives it a thematic thrill. Similarly, Ray suggests offering the popular litchi martini with a canned litchi as a garnish and calling it an "eyeball martini".

Debra Lykkemark, president of Culinary Capers Catering, also advises limiting the gross factor. For Halloween, her company has done things like witch's fingers shortbread cookies, with long fingernails done in red icing. "The fingers look kind of gross, but not really," she says in a phone interview from her office. "They're not something that people wouldn't want to eat." Spider cakes are cute rather than icky, made of iced chocolate cupcakes with red-jelly bean eyes and licorice legs.

Creative presentation also helps. Lykkemark has served martinis in test tubes, mad-scientist style, and has skewered laboratory pipettes filled with orange juice to the end of pistachio chicken meatballs. (Eat the appetizer, then squeeze the tiny vial of liquid into your mouth.) "Using dry ice is always fun," she adds. Place a nugget of dry ice in a tealight candle holder, and put that into a hollowed-out mini pumpkin. Add hot water to make the dry ice steam, place the pumpkin on a plate of hors d'oeuvres, and "the effect is very cool." (You can find dry ice at Praxair [2080 Clark Drive, 604-255-6007].)

The queen of entertaining, Martha Stewart, has an extensive collection of Halloween recipes on her Web site, at www.marthastewart.com/, including shortbread Ladies' Fingers. The American Food Network Web site (www.foodnetwork.com/) offers many creative recipes, such as a cheese-ball goblin, pecan-caramel spiders, and nonalcoholic punches with gummy worm ice cubes. The BC Liquor Stores Web site (www.bcliquorstores.com/) offers 19 creepy drink recipes, from a Black Martini to Frankenstein cocktail. For the latter recipe, see www.straight.com/.