Mummy Brie Recipe

Halloween parties in many cases are all about the kids, featuring all manner of holiday-themed cookies, cupcakes, and other sugary treats. If you're lucky, you might spot a few monster-faced sandwiches or pumpkin-shaped pizzas to provide a little bit of protein, too. But even at a children's party, you've still got to feed the "Mummies" and "Deadies", too, so why not whip up a few adult-approved Halloween treats to go along with all the kid-friendly fare?

Recipe developer Kristen Carli came up with this delicious baked brie en croute with an interesting twist –- the croute (that's the crust) is made to look like mummy wrappings! As she tells us, "You really can make anything into a mummy with crescent dough!" Not only does the dough serve a decorative purpose, but it also adds texture and crunch and serves as a canvas on which you can add some additional decorative touches should you feel so inclined. Here's how to make this Halloween version of a party classic.

As Carli says of this recipe, "I love baked brie wrapped in dough — it's creamy and gooey but wrapped in crisp crescent dough." This simple statement about her recipe could also stand in for an ingredients list -– well, the vast majority of it, at any rate.

This wonderfully simple recipe packs in plenty of flavor in those three ingredients, however. In addition to a wheel of brie cheese and crescent roll dough, you're only going to need just one more thing: something to give the mummy "eyeballs." Carli chose to use Spanish-style olives, so her brie mummy has green eyes.

So, why did the ancient Egyptians wrap up their mummies? How Stuff Works said one reason was to help hold the body together and also to make it look better as the deceased prepared to enter the afterlife. In the case of baked brie, the dough "bandaging" also helps the cheese retain its shape. It's also going to visually turn it into a yummy mummy that's ready to enter your tummy.

In order to make this brie mummy, you'll start by preheating the oven to 375 F, then whacking the tube of crescent rolls against a counter to open it up. That's arguably the best part of baking with refrigerated dough! Take out just one of the sheets, as you won't be using up the whole tube. According to Carli, "I used half the dough for this recipe," so she sliced up 4 ounces' worth of an 8-ounce tube of dough. You can set the other dough to the side or bake them up and enjoy a crescent roll or two in your own kitchen.

Unfold the dough and roll it, if necessary, to flatten it out a bit. Slice the dough into thin strips using a knife or a pizza cutter. Then, wrap the strips around the brie to transform it into a mummy's head, tucking the ends under one face of the cheese wheel.

Once your mummy head is wrapped, place the brie into a small baking pan. You can then use green olives to make the eyes, as Carli did. If you want something different, consider using black olives or whole nuts of some sort. You could even go with fruits like blackberries or cherries, given that brie lends itself well to pairing with sweeter flavors just as well as salty ones. 

Speaking of sweet touches, Carli suggests upping the eerie factor if your party-goers can handle it. "You could also make the mummy more scary by adding "blood" with strawberry jam," she says. In fact, you could even go one step further and spread a thin layer of jam over the brie before you wrap it in the dough.

However you decide to prepare it, when you're ready, simply bake the brie for 13 minutes. At that point, it should be golden brown and all of the dough should be cooked through.

And that's it! Your brie is nearly ready to go, though you'll probably want to get some accompaniments that allow diners to dig into the mummy brie. Carli says that "I love pairing this brie with fruit, crackers, and even fruit spreads like fig jam or apple butter."

The mummy-wrapped version would, of course, look great as part of a spooky snack buffet, perhaps paired with these cheese and pretzel broomsticks or a bowl of monster-faced pasta and maybe some cute clementine pumpkins. Oh, and don't forget the Oreo cookie bats and candy corn parfaits for dessert!