My Ghoulish Finger Dough Sticks are a spooktacular accompaniment to soups, stews and dips – especially at Halloween…
Let’s face it, Halloween signals the start of three months of sugar-crazed madness in Britain. The gelatinous sweets from trick-or-treat and the toffee apples from bonfire night give way to a chocolate-propelled countdown of Advent and an excess of indulgences at Christmas. It’s little wonder we all grab the opportunity of the New Year to purge our systems of the toxins we’ve accumulated throughout autumn.
Life should be about balance. There’s nothing wrong with the odd sweet here and there, but there are other ways to celebrate the late-season festivals without resulting in glucose overload. It was with such a thought that I developed my Ghoulish Finger Dough Sticks – a savoury spooky addition to any Halloween table.
This is just a simple bread stick recipe, dressed up with some knife work to replicate the wrinkles of a finger, topped with a flaked almond finger nail. They’re the perfect accompaniment to any soup or stew, or served as implements to plunge into humous and dips. They require very little effort to make, and children love to help with the final stages of finger assembly before the oven.
Why not try these dipped in some humous or served alongside a batch of my Harissa Spiced Pumpkin and Sweet Potato Soup?
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Ghoulish Finger Dough Sticks
- Prep Time: 3 Hours 15 Minutes
- Cook Time: 20 Minutes
- Total Time: 3 hours 35 minutes
- Yield: 40 1x
Ingredients
- 500g Strong white Bread Flour
- 7g easy bake yeast (1 sachet)
- 250ml lukewarm water
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tbsp Malt Extract
- 1tsp salt flakes
- Almond Flakes
Instructions
- Measure the water and yeast into a measuring jug before whisking and leaving to one side while you prepare everything else.
- Put the flour and salt into a freestanding mixer, fitted with a dough hook. You can make this by hand if you so wish, but I am happy to let my mixer take the strain for this simple bread recipe.
- Make a well in the middle of the flour and add the olive oil and malt extract, before pouring in the yeast mixture. Set the mixer off on a slow speed to bring everything together, before turning up to high for around 2 minutes. If you are doing this by hand, it will take around ten minutes of kneading on a clean surface until you have a soft, smooth dough. Pop the dough into a clean bowl, cover and leave somewhere warm for around 3 hours until the dough has doubled in size. I like to put the bowl in my oven with the door closed and the light on – the bulb providing sufficient heat to let the yeast get to work.
- After about three hours, remove the risen dough from the bowl and knead briefly on a clean work surface to knock the air out of it.
- Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4.
- Roll the dough out on a floured surface to form a large, shallow oblong – roughly 60cm x 15cm. Use a sharp knife or a pizza wheel to cut the dough into finger shapes – as thin or as thick as you like. I use my thumb as a guide to get equally sized fingers. Gently roll each finger on the worksurface like a sausage to round off any edges before placing on a baking sheet. Make cuts with a sharp knife to recreate the wrinkles and knuckles of fingers before sticking a slither of almond as a finger nail to the top of each dough stick – using a dab of water to help it stick. Leave a little gap between each dough stick to allow space for the dough to spread out, before conveying the tray to the preheated oven.
- Bake in the oven for 20 minutes before removing and leaving to cool a little on a rack. Serve while still slightly warm as an accompaniment for soups or dips.
- Category: Bread, Baking, Halloween
Keywords: halloween, halloween party, bread sticks, dough sticks, scary food, spooky
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