Food artist Nikk Alcaraz knows a thing or two about show-stopping, spooky pastries. In his upcoming cookbook, Peculiar Baking: A Practical Guide to Strange Confections, he lays out in great detail how to make gorgeous and gruesome desserts. These range from cakes bristling with fangs to peach-oatmeal cookies decorated with realistic chocolate mealworms. Yet there are also recipes for shortbread decorated with an elegant arrangement of herbs, and vibrantly red miniature pies decorated to look like ladybugs. “People would expect this book to be a Halloween book,” Alcaraz says, “but I wrote this book to be a book for all year.”
His Apple Eye Pies—hand pies inset with glaring, edible eyeballs—that first put him on the social media map weren’t made for Halloween. For Valentine’s Day in 2021, he whipped them up for his TikTok account as a play on the phrase “the apple of my eye.” The video went viral, and even Gordon Ramsay weighed in. “He said, ‘It’s Valentine’s Day, not Halloween, you donut. No wonder you’re still single,’” Alcaraz laughs.
Of course, Alcaraz loves Halloween. It’s a taste he inherited from his grandmother, who, he says, “loved everything witchy.” Alcaraz was raised by his grandmother, and the two of them enjoyed baking and watching movies together. “We used to play VHSs of all the classic Halloween movies, Children of the Corn and Evil Dead and all that,” he says. “That was our pastime, just watching Halloween movies and just feeling like it was Halloween all year.”
That combination of influences—wholesome and horrifying—comes through in Peculiar Baking. The Scary Cherry Pie might cause a start at first glance. “You look at the face, and it gives you this weird feeling. But then you see the cherries, and you know that they’re cherries, but your mind also gets creative and says, Oh, that could be blood,” Alcaraz says. “People are interested in things that are not what they’re supposed to be.”
On the more wholesome side, Alcaraz also says he gets his inspiration from nature. “I do say in the introduction [to the book] that the intricacies of a spider web or the celestial happenings in the sky all set my imagination on fire,” he says. “What you’re experiencing in the book are things that I’ve taken from the world around us, and I’m wanting to amplify the peculiarity of them.”
Alcaraz has also taken inspiration from where he grew up, in New Mexico, which has its own unique baking and cultural traditions. For example, there’s a recipe in the book for biscochitos, a cinnamon-dusted, anise-flavored cookie. “That is the New Mexico state cookie,” he says. “It’s the only state that has an official cookie.” It’s also the treat that his grandmother made the most, and the first thing, he says, that he ever learned how to bake. “So it’s very special to me,” he says. “I know it’s not very peculiar to most people, but it’s very traditional.”
A more unusual recipe of his own creation is Farolito Bread. Farolitos (or luminarias) are an age-old Christmas tradition in the state, where people light the pathways around their homes and to the church with votive candles inside paper bags. But baked within the bags in Alcaraz’s recipe, there’s a sweet, pine nut–laced bread instead of a candle.
As fanciful as the recipes in Peculiar Baking are, they require rigorous attention to detail, painstaking care, and, often, several pages of instructions. But that’s also an element of magic, argues Alcaraz. “The cookbook is modeled after a grimoire, a spell book,” he says. “And I stress in the beginning that following a recipe is like casting a spell. You have to do it step by step, just as written, or it’ll backfire.”
Making culinary magic may be difficult, but Alcaraz is encouraged by how many people enjoy his creations, whether they see them under his Practical Peculiarities handle online or in one of his television appearances on shows like Killer Cakes. When his very first video, the Apple Pie Eyes, went viral, he felt like it was a sign that quitting his job and focusing on his creative food art had been the right decision. “I felt like my grandma—she passed away in 2014—I felt like she was really guiding me to a happier life. So I just listened to the wind and kept going and kept going.”
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