'Halloween Baking Championship' Judges' Best Costumes Through the Years

Food Network's popular scary-season competition show, Halloween Baking Championship, presents consistently creative confections that linger in the imagination long after the credits roll. We’re here, however, to dish about the next-level costume changes judges Carla Hall, Zac Young, Stephanie Boswell and their colleagues undergo to serve Halloween-worthy eye candy. "You don’t realize how much we go through for a costume,” Carla told Food Network. “That is why when we get into it, we get into it.”

Their chef’s-kiss hit parade might be the ultimate Halloween-costume mood board.

Pictured: Carla, Zac and Stephanie dressed up during Season 11, Episode 4.

Steph rocked the “GOATS of Ghosts” theme in Season 11 as an incorporeal Joan of Arc. Though, she admittedly loved Zac’s ghost-of-middle-school costume even more than her own: “He had me cracking up that entire day of filming,” she confessed on Instagram.

Season 11’s premiere grabbed everyone by the throat — viewers figuratively, Carla literally — and didn’t let up. Zoom in and you'll see what looks like a hand crawling around under Carla's chic crushed-velvet blazer.

Zac underwent more than two hours of airbrushing and other, goopier special-effects makeup to gain the forgotten-corpse-in-an-icebox pallor he sported in the Season 11 premiere. And as for the slightly identifiable produce he sported on his shirt … it looks like it took its time getting to the studio as well.

Steph referenced The Wizard of Oz with a thunderclap in Season 10. Swathed in ominous stuffing that had sucked up cars, farm equipment and animals, she reached wind speeds significant enough to whisk away fellow judge Zac (who dressed as a cow caught in the vortex).

Season 10 featured delightful riffs on everyone’s favorite embalmed-Egyptian costumes. Steph did it for the ‘gram as a yummy mummy, while Zac paid homage to Faye Dunaway’s iconic turn as Mummy Dearest (“NO COATING CHOCOLATE EVEEERRRR!!!”). This was one of Zac’s all-time favorite costumes, and who can blame him?

Also in Season 10, Carla and the crew matched the contestants’ “Mad Mutations and Transformations” challenge with terrifying takes on the Easter Bunny. (Zac: “Were there any Easter bunnies in the '80s and '90s that weren’t a little creepy?”) Steph and Zac’s leporine looks were also unforgettable (unfortunately), but Carla’s fur-and-fangs combo hopped ahead of the pack.

Zac’s chiropractor-defying contortionist costume in Season 9 was a collaboration between the art, hair and makeup departments (“teamwork makes the scream work,” as he put it) and a nod to Halloween Baking camera operator Jeremy Ocampo, whose luscious locks inspired Zac’s.

What’s a creepy carnival without anthropomorphic fair food? During Season 9, Steph cozied up in a costume that may have made her the world’s largest cotton-candy sculpture (the official record is a mere 37 pounds).

Steph greeted competitors in the Season 9 premiere as a medium’s spirit ball, though she didn’t offer any clues as to how their futures would unfold at the Henson & Sons Carnival. Given that Carla and Zac appeared in the same episode as a terrifying clown and a tarot deck’s least auspicious card, it was fair to say they were in for the ride of their lives.

Unveiled as “De-Mona Lisa” in Season 8, Steph would have confused Leonardo da Vinci, and we salute her for that. (That is, in fact, Zac as Bob Ross in the background. A happy accident, as it were.)

The service industry isn’t for the faint of heart. Zac strolled into Season 8 as a decidedly unlucky bellhop — or, you know, the Headless Horseman’s cousin who moved to the city for work.

It takes two to topiary, and Zac and Carla took "aggressive pruning" over the top in Season 8. (If these ghastly hotel denizens remind you of The Shining, you aren’t alone. Halloween Baking is full of nods to Kubrick’s classic film.)

Carla draped herself in feline finery (including several yards of faux fur) for the Season 7 finale. Were snow-white tufts this luxurious a risky move in the context of a frequently goopy baking show? Unquestionably. Was she up for the high-wire act of keeping them pristine? Absolutely.

Carla posed as a sparkly yet stiff dancing queen who never made it past 17 in Season 7. She could dance, she could jive — and she had the time of her afterlife.

Carla and Stephanie doubled down on chills as the Grady Girls — last seen looking for a playmate at the Overlook Hotel — in Season 7's second episode.

Zac channeled Liberace in all his gilded (ghostly) glory in Season 6. Did the makeup team go all in to give him an ashen and somehow also pearly pallor? As the maestro himself would have said, too much of a good thing is wonderful.

Carla also brought the heat in Season 6. Do infernal judges sample dishes with pitchforks? She wasn't telling.

During Season 6, Steph did strong work as a high-fashion cryptid. The hair and makeup team absolutely outdid themselves, but the real heroes might have been the camerapeople, who managed to get a shot of her that isn't blurry at all. Take that, skeptics!

Was there more product on Zac's hair or chest? He stepped from the cover of a romance novel to claim the spotlight during Season 5.

Carla was cued up to groan the day's news as a sharp-shouldered, decidedly undead local correspondent in an episode from Season 5. What, we're afraid to ask, was in her mug?

Life is only a cabaret, old chum, and Zac loves a cabaret! He paid tribute to the iconic Liza Minnelli with sequins, eye shadow and a pitch-perfect bob in Season 5.

"Last year, I was a garden gnome," Zac wrote on Instagram. "This year [in Season 5], a flamingo. What other lawn ornaments can I be?" (We'd argue this foreshadowed his Shining topiary boxwood costume.)

Season 5 judge Katie Lee brought midcentury Pop Art to the studio as a three-dimensional comic-art character, complete with Ben-Day dots.

Does Zac get twice the credit for dressing as the Big Bad Wolf disguised as Little Red Riding Hood's granny for the Season 5 premiere?

See, this is what happens when you don't stick to baked goods' "best before" dates. Zac struck a bittersweet pose as a cupcake past its prime in Season 4.

The spirit of transformation on Halloween Baking Championship is so infectious that even host John Henson gets in on the costume fun. He's got a ways to go, mind you, but the wedding dress he sported in Season 4 is the first step down the aisle.

Mozart composed more than 600 pieces of music before his untimely death at 35. We don't know what or how much Zac composed as a pink-wigged, reanimated version of him during Season 4, but we imagine it was extremely dramatic.

Zac conflated manscaping with landscaping as a beard-sporting garden denizen for the first episode of Season 4.