Homemade Halloween Treats and Candy

Halloween is the one night of the year when candy stops being a treat and becomes infrastructure. Here is everything we make for it, and everything we do with what comes back.

Start here if you have thirty minutes

Halloween baking has a habit of turning into a project. These do not.

Halloween chocolate bark is the shortest route to something that looks like effort. Melt, spread, scatter, chill. No thermometer, no sugar stages, and the topping is whatever you have. If you want the year-round version, it is the same recipe without the orange.

Homemade gummy worms take three ingredients and a silicone mould. They set in the fridge while you do something else, and they are considerably more disturbing than the shop-bought ones, which is the point.

Worth the extra hour

Rice krispie treats take colour well and cut into any shape you can find a cutter for. Ours stay chewy for days rather than going brittle overnight, which matters if you are making them the weekend before.

Peanut butter buckeyes are not traditionally Halloween, but a bare circle of peanut butter on a chocolate sphere looks uncomfortably like an eye, and nobody has ever turned one down.

For the party table

Homemade Twix bars and homemade Snickers both cut into small squares and both survive sitting out for a few hours. If you are feeding a crowd, these travel better than anything that needs refrigerating.

And then November arrives

The bags come home full and the problem inverts. What to do with leftover Halloween candy covers the freezer tricks, what actually keeps, and how to bake the rest into something better than it started as.

Most of the recipes above take leftover candy directly. Bark in particular is a good place to put whatever nobody wanted.