The Best Halloween Baking Championship Episodes Ranked

Welcome to "Halloween Baking Championship," the show that puts bakers to the test in a contest to create some seriously spooky treats in a series of Halloween-themed challenges. As the competition escalates, renowned culinary figures act as judges, including Ron Ben-Israel, Carla Hall, and Sherry Yard. Anyone who doesn't measure up gets eliminated.

The best bakers move forward as challenges increase in difficulty. Ultimately, the final champion wins $25,000 and the title of the season's creepiest cooking contest winner. Choosing the top episodes proved to be a challenge in itself, given that there are eight seasons of this show, each filled with episodes with some of Halloween's creepiest and most delicious treats.

Luckily for you, we not only love and appreciate crazy Halloween baked goods but also a challenge-centered reality show. We watched a wild amount of "Halloween Baking Championship" episodes so you don't have to. Keep reading to dive into our ranking of the best "Halloween Baking Championship" episodes.

Season 3 of "Halloween Baking Championship" ended in the best possible way, with an Extreme Halloween finale. This episode rounded out the season, putting the bakers to the spookiest of tests with an added twist: glow-in-the-dark cakes.

For the pre-heat Halloween party, the bakers received the challenge of making glowing edible centerpieces and three accompanying spooky treats for the themed dessert bar. Perhaps things are a bit different in your kitchen, but it's not every day that we make our baked goods glow in the dark. Watching the bakers tackle this challenge was especially gratifying.

The remaining contestants in the main heat round created a light-up Jack-o'-lantern cake to be considered for the grand prize. Carving a Jack-o'-lantern is hard enough, doing so with cake presented even more of a challenge. This episode left us in awe. Frankly, it's incredible what these bakers can do with light-up materials, baking basics, and some sheer ingenuity as the clock ticks down.

In this Season 6, Episode 2 entry of "Halloween Baking Championship" titled "Sweet Illusions," judge Carla Hall asked the nine competitors to create Halloween candy croquembouche, incorporating a spooky illusion to fit with the theme and, of course, making things all the more impressive when it came time to judge. This classic French recipe consists of choux pastry puffs piled into a cone and bound together with threads of caramel. The tower appears to be a massive dessert all on its own. However, if you look closely, you will see that it's made out of many smaller choux buns. The bakers seriously impressed us with their creativity.

These little buns seem easy enough to create, but when you add a tower and the challenge of an illusion effect, the kitchen suddenly gets a few degrees hotter. We loved watching the creativity unfold with the illusions the bakers add to their croquembouche towers.

Everyone probably has a skeleton or two in their closet, but in Season 5, Episode 1 of "Halloween Baking Championship," host John Henson revealed all of the skeletons in his family's closet in an effort to inspire the eight remaining bakers. This episode's challenge called for making scary skeleton-themed desserts. These weren't your average store-bought cupcakes with sugar skeletons on top, of course. The bakers went all out to level up past the competition, resulting in bone chilling yet utterly delicious desserts.

After many seasons of watching "Halloween Baking Championship," we know a second challenge is in the works. For the "main heat," we transitioned from skeletons to monster madness in the kitchen. The bakers created a monster under the bed-themed creation to come out on top. The spooky Halloween creativity shows through in this episode as the bakers effortlessly went from skeletons to monsters with ease.

If you couldn't guess by the name, Season 5, Episode 5, deemed "Gravely Delicious Desserts," will send you straight to the cemetery for some burial-inspired treats.

The host challenged the four remaining bakers to create grave robber-inspired desserts. Uncover the tombs and pass the flour! Here, the bakers got wild and creative in this deathly challenge that has us going underground.

"Halloween Baking Championship" rarely leaves us with only one challenge per episode, so we expected something good in the main heat. This episode's main challenge theme was a night at the cemetery. The deathly theme was brought to life as competitors sculpted marble tomb cakes. While the theme was indeed eerie and spooky, we couldn't help but drool over the sight of these lovely and creepy marble cakes. We think that two cake flavors are better than one, making this episode all the sweeter for its delicious spookiness.

Is it all in your head? It sure is in Season 3, Episode 3, where the challenges revolved around one crucial body part: the brain.

In the pre-heat, the remaining bakers formed teams to put their heads together and create the most outrageous left and right-brain-themed desserts they coudl imagine. Each member of the team was responsible for half of the brain, while each side had to come together to create a cohesive dessert. Two heads are better than one, but for some this caused extra drama in the kitchen.

The main heat then turned brains to bugs. In this challenge, the bakers faced their fears of insects and ghosts to create disgusting-looking but delicious-tasting desserts. Do cockroach crunch cupcakes sound good to you? If not, look away when this challenge hits your screen, as all the desserts followed this creepy crawly theme.

Finale episodes already have us on the edges of our seats, but Season 5, Episode 6 added a new level of haunting to the proceedings. The host suggests that some ghosts have been lingering around, so it only makes sense for the bakers to construct a "Ghostembouche" — that is, of course, the ghostly version of a croquembouche tower. It was gripping to see if the bakers could stack those cream puffs high without interference from ghosts or ghouls.

In the final challenge, the bakers faced off to create bleeding zombie cakes. The great debate of the episode: Do zombies bleed? We've think they only bleed when captured in a baked good like a cake filled with buttercream. Blood orange may be the flavor bakers added to their recipes here, but it was always going to be a bloodbath in the kitchen to win the grand prize.

In Season 4, Episode 2, the bakers created autumnal desserts with yams. But with every challenge on "Halloween Baking Championship," there was a creepy catch. The yam dessert could not be a pie and must evoke a classic scary movie cliche (via Food Network). Think chainsaws, masked men, bloody knives, and creepy dolls.

The main heat took on a more traditional Halloween route as bakers navigated the "bundtkin patch" to create a pumpkin patch made out of mini bundt cakes. You see it all in this challenge, from traditional chocolate cakes with chocolate glaze, ginger cakes with white chocolate ginger ganache, and even peanut butter confections mixed with Sriracha, which is perhaps more common than you might expect. The host added yet another layer of difficulty as the timer ran closer to zero, telling bakers to add an edible scarecrow to their pumpkin patch.