How to Build a Gothic Cheeseboard
A spooky cheeseboard is mostly a trick of colour. Choose dark, dramatic ingredients, stage them with a little theatre, and the board does the work for you. Beautifully eerie, and entirely plant-based.
Here is how we would build ours.
Start with three cheeses
You want contrast above all: something that oozes, something striking to look at, and something pale enough to make the dark things look darker.
Brick Lane Bree. Take a wedge of brie and slice off three corners to form a coffin silhouette. It takes seconds to look the part. Spell out RIP across the top by scoring the rind with a knife!
Balham Blue. A vivid blue with a mellow, sweet depth and a piquant, lingering finish, its veining doing all the gothic work for you. Sweet potato lends a golden richness, so it reads as striking.
Camemvert. Score the top, bake it until the middle turns properly molten, and bring it to the table still bubbling. A board needs one thing that moves.
The gothic colour palette
Surround the cheeses with naturally dark and atmospheric things, and resist the urge to brighten anything.
The shadows — black and deep purple. Black grapes, fresh blackberries, dark figs halved so the inside shows, and pitted kalamata olives. If you can track down activated charcoal crackers (we love Miller's!), they give you a pitch-black base that makes everything above them glow.
The harvest — deep orange. Dried apricots, physalis with their papery husks left intact, and roasted pumpkin seeds scattered into the gaps.
The contrast — stark white. Fan out pale crackers, or lay down a wedge of something white and bloomy. Without a little brightness, a dark board simply reads as a dark board.
The base, and the staging
Build everything on dark slate, a black tray, or a wooden coffin board if you happen to have one. The surface is half the effect.
Then the theatre: a well-washed plastic skeleton hand reaching across the cheese, or a miniature skull nestled among the grapes. One or two props is plenty — the board should look composed.
