How to Upgrade Your Halloween Candy Game and Not Cheap out

Halloween: a favorite holiday for scares, spooks, kooks, and candy lovers! When it comes to Halloween, we can really take advantage of treats as much as tricks — and that means upping our candy game big-time. Here’s how we suggest you upgrade your Halloween candy game:

Have A Halloween Potluck

One of our favorite ideas around the office has to be a Halloween potluck. Everyone dresses up and embraces the season with fun, cute, or terrifying costumes... and then brings a sweet treat as a delicious crowd pleaser. It can be anything from little brownies studded in caramel chips and frosted with a skull pattern to a “spooky” pudding hacked through with a toy machete. Upping your candy game can be a pleasure when cook pastries and desserts with classic candy combos, like:

• Lava cakes filled with a peanut butter cup
• Cupcakes topped with Oreo “dirt” and decorated with a gummy worm (we like the gummy variety at Dylan’s Candy Bar)
• Double-layer brownies made extra-special with a layer of chocolate chip cookie dough and little pieces of Butterfinger
• Nutella poured it silicone molds with crushed Kit Kat on the top of each chocolate nugget. How do you pull that off? Fill a silicone mold halfway, spoon in some Kit Kat, press down lightly, add another layer of Nutella, and then freeze overnight. You’ve got yummy Nutella nuggets to enjoy any time. Serve frozen!
• Melted chocolate with candy corn pressed into it and frozen
• Spooky Halloween Candy Cake Pops that are decorated for the season

Take Time With The Grab Bags

Halloween is a great time for grab bags, whether you’re giving out candy to trick-or-treaters or your coworkers. Play with a theme and design grab bags that have a lot of added interest: “From the Grave” (gummy worms and eyeballs with white chocolate mice), a “Full Moon” pack (white chocolate discs, vampire teeth, and dark chocolate Milky Way bars), and “Under the Spooky Big Top” (circus peanuts dripped in “blood” made from red food coloring mixed with a smidgen of icing sugar or frosting).

Incorporate Food Into Your Halloween Costume

Giving out candy is one thing, but mixing it into your costume is another. Consider being a piñata (make a papier-mâché base that incorporates hidden candy compartments), a Christmas tree (have all the “ornaments” be candy boxes), or a baseball stadium concessions seller, with real treats, of course.

Add Spookiness To Your Everyday

Maybe you don’t have anything special planned for Halloween, but you don’t want it to pass you by without marking the occasion somehow. What we suggest is a riff on the mundane — make gelatin dessert with tiny gummy worms stuck deep down inside, nestle a plastic pair of vampire fangs in a cake donut to make it extra-scary, or serve a plain brownie on a plate dusted with icing sugar in the shape of a bat or mouse (simply print a stencil out online and lightly dust a plate before plating your treat). Extra points for candy corn garnish!