Mummy Hot Dogs, The Halloween Tray I Make Every Year

Why I Keep Making This

• Thin strips, not fat ones. Every skinny-cut batch has come out with the sausage still glinting through the gaps.
• One can does the lot. And no maths. Eight mummies.
• Mustard eyes go on after resting, two wet dots that stay put instead of sliding down the front.
• Kids wrap them. Badly. Fingerprints pressed into the dough. That’s the point.

What You Need To Know Before You Start

Hardest part: 40-odd strips, cut thin enough not to tear. But some tear anyway. Mine always do.

Biggest time saver: unroll the dough straight onto the parchment and cut it right there. No floured board. I hate washing up.

A Few Notes On What Goes In

Pillsbury crescent dough, the 8 oz tube. I’ve tried the store brand twice and both times it tore under my knife like wet paper. Parchment, always. Bare metal grabs.

Hot dogs: 8 bun-length beef ones. Thin cheap ones curl on me every single time. Turkey dogs, fine.

Yellow mustard for the eyes, straight out of the squeezy bottle. But I skip the egg wash, because I tried it once and the dough, which was fine until then, went too dark too fast.

Mummies aren’t meant to be tanned.

The Method

2. Dry The Hot Dogs

Pat each one dry. “They’re sweating,” my sister said once, and she wasn’t wrong, because wet casing makes the dough slip off mid-wrap and you won’t see it coming until the tray is out.

Dry them properly.

3. Cut The Dough Into Strips

Parchment down first. Unroll one 8 oz can of crescent dough onto it. Pinch every perforated seam shut with your thumb, and do it properly, because I once skipped two and the whole sheet came apart under the pizza wheel. Cut lengthways. Thin, about a quarter inch. I aim for 40 or so and never count.

I don’t measure these. A pizza wheel, eyeballed. Four or five come out fat every single time and I’ve stopped caring (nobody at my table has ever noticed). Cold dough cuts clean. Warm dough, and this took me a few goes to work out, just drags under the blade.

4. Wrap The Mummies

Four strips per dog, five if they’re skinny, and you want them crossing at angles like the wrapping was done in a hurry by someone who didn’t care much. Not neat. Messy is the look. Leave yourself a clear half-inch of bare hot dog near one end, that’s where the face goes.

That’s the rule.

Overlap is good and neat is not.

Wrap loosely. Because if you pull the strips tight they’ll snap in the oven, which I found out on my second tray ever, in 2019 I think, when every last one of them split open along the top.

5. Bake

Space them two inches apart. Bake 13 to 15 minutes. The dough sets first and takes colour, pale gold, only on the ridges. Internal temp should read 165°F/74°C.

The box says 15. But mine has never needed more than 13, and by then you can hear the sausages hissing faintly under all that dough.

Watch the thin ends. Twice as fast as the middles.

6. Rest, Then Eyes

5 minutes on the pan once the tray’s out. Don’t rush that bit. Then two small dots of yellow mustard, straight into the gap you saved. Face done. And if you do it hot the mustard slides into a yellow smear and your mummy looks like it’s crying.

Variations And Add-Ins

Cheese first. I lay a thin strip of cheddar down the hot dog. Then wrap. It leaks out the gaps. Looks like an injury, honestly. One year the whole lot ran off the end. Welded itself to the parchment. I scraped for ten minutes.

Cocktail sausages give you about 20 mini mummies off that same can. Bake closer to 11.

Watch them.

Vegan dogs work and the timing barely moves, and I’ll say it, I like them better, because they don’t sweat that greasy film under the dough. You press one and it pushes back. Next to a tray of witch finger breadsticks, the vegan ones go first. Every time.

Storage And Freezing

Making Ahead: wrap them raw. Cover the tray. Fridge, up to 24 hours.

Freeze them raw. Wrapped and unbaked on the tray until solid. Then bagged. They’ll sit 2 months without freezer burn if the bag is shut properly. Bake from frozen and add 5 or 6 minutes.

Leftovers: 3 days in the fridge, sealed tub. “Can I have a cold one?” Will the dough still be crisp on day two? No.

Leftovers And Reheating

Oven, 350°F/175°C, about 8 minutes on a rack, and I put mine on the middle shelf because the top one browns the strips too fast. They crisp back. Really they do. But skip the microwave, you’ll get grey and chewy.

Cold ones reheat poorly (the dough goes leathery at fridge temperature) but I eat them anyway, standing at the counter the morning after, which isn’t a recommendation so much as a confession.

Air fryer works too. 320°F for roughly 4 minutes, though check at 3 because they catch.

Where The Mummy hot dogs Halloween Recipe Goes Wrong

Strips cut too wide. That’s the main crime. You hear the dough thud instead of tearing, and that’s your warning. Know what you end up with? A hot dog in a cardigan.

Not drying the sausages is second, and it goes wrong quietly, so you don’t notice until the dough slides off in your fingers.

Third, and this one is mine. Mustard before resting.

Overbaking is the quiet killer. At 17 minutes the dough browns properly and mummies stop looking like mummies. The week it rained solidly last October I did three trays back to back and forgot the timer on the second one (my timer died in March and I still use my phone).

Common Questions