Lucy Arlington's Recipes For Leftover Halloween Candy

By Lucy Arlington

Having just received the finalized version of the cover for the second book in the Novel Idea Mystery series, Every Trick in the Book, my thoughts naturally turned to Halloween. The book doesn’t come out until February, but it is set during the months of October and November. 

Lila Wilkins, the heroine of the series, a single mom literary agent in her mid-forties, is a bit frugal and I began to wonder which kind of candy she’d buy for the kids in her charming little neighborhood of Walden Woods. I then mulled over what Lila would do if she ended up with extra candy. She only has one child and though she could bring the leftovers into A Novel Idea, she’s so creative that I immediately envisioned what she’d do with the Hershey bars, M&Ms, and caramel squares she was unable to drop into the bags of eager trick-or-treaters.

Lila’s Recipes for Leftover Halloween Candy

Put small pieces (like M&Ms, Skittles, or red hots) away in sealed plastic bags to use in decorating gingerbread houses come December.

Make candy milkshakes. The base for the milkshake is simple:

½ cup milk

1 ½ cups vanilla ice cream of frozen yogurt

½ cup candy pieces (try using Butterfinger, Snickers, and Whoppers to make a flavorful shake)

Whip up a bowl of trail mix. Folks are now handing out little boxes of raisins and snack-sized bags of pretzels, so use them with a snack-sized bags of M&Ms or Raisinets to make a treat with a little less sugar. Use equal parts of the following:

Your favorite nuts (peanuts, cashews, almonds, sunflower seeds)

raisins or dried cranberries

cereal (such as Cheerios, granola, or bran flakes)

pretzels

Create turkey cupcakes decorated with candy corns. Just bake a batch of cupcakes, frost with chocolate icing, use half a Nutter Butter for the body, a chocolate wafer cookie for the tail, and candy corns for the turkey’s “gobbler”.

Speaking of baking, those peanut butter cups, Hershey’s kisses, milky ways, M&Ms, and Snickers can all be added to this basic sugar cookie recipe:

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 ¾ granulated sugar

2 large eggs

1 cup (2 sticks) softened butter

1 tablespoon pure vanilla

Preheat oven to 350. Sift flour and baking soda into bowl. Put sugar in separate bowl and add butter. Mix with electric butter until batter is fluffy. Mix in eggs, then vanilla. Gradually add flour mixture. Add candy pieces from your Halloween bowl. Bake on parchment paper for 15 minutes or until cookies are golden.

And if none of these ideas tempt your taste buds, donate your candy to our troops. Here’s the link to Operation Shoebox.

What Halloween candy will you be buying?