About Those Treats

38°f/3 3°C, clear. No rain in sight for the next few days.

Some details about the Halloween-themed treats I made for the open mic.

These were supposed to be "quick and easy", but don't believe everything you read online. Some turned out to be a lot trickier than you might think.

First, these monster fingers, which were supposed to be witch fingers. A lady at the event saw them and said, "Oh, monster fingers!" And so that is what they were.

I decided to make these Monday so I would have plenty of time if things went awry. Which they did!

The directions used a sugar cookie recipe, but I opted, for simplicity's sake, to use store-bought cookie dough--my first mistake. I mixed in the green food color, made a tray of cookies by rolling the dough into finger shapes, pressing in a sliced almond, and using a knife to cut shallow grooves for knuckles.  They looked so cute, until I baked them. Then they spread w-a-a-y out, into big green blobs with an oddly placed almond. Uh-oh.  

I began adding flour to the dough, baking one or two cookies at a time, until I got the right shape. Thank goodness for free gas! It probably took me a good two hours of fiddling around, but in the end I was pleased with the result. Here's the odd thing: I must have added well over a cup of plain flour to the store-bought dough, but they were still crisp and tasted just fine. Which made me wonder about the fat and sugar content of the original dough. I think if I made them again I would make the dough from scratch, since the pre-made dough ended up not really saving me any time.

Next were these supposedly super-easy ghosts.  Yeah, well, maybe for some people they're easy, but it wasn't that way for me. There are only 2 ingredients: white chocolate chips and chow mein noodles. How hard could it be, right?  I happily melted the chips and stirred in the crispy noodles, then spooned them out--and that's where I ran into trouble. The noodles were so big that they stuck out everywhere in odd shapes. I flattened them as best as I could, then tried, per the instructions, to dab on the black decorator icing to make the eyes and mouth. Oh, how odd they looked, like some demented person had made them! (Probably true by this point) This was Monday evening and I quit for the day.

I started over Tuesday morning, pulverizing the noodles this time, and adding not only the chips but also a lot of white dipping chocolate. They were much easier to shape, and I used a tiny paint brush to do the black eyes and mouth. Not perfect, but presentable.

I used the ghosts I had messed up to make haystacks, adding melted butterscotch to give them the right color. These actually were easy!

The witches' brooms were the easiest, though. It took longer to unwrap all those Reese's Cups than it did to do the rest! I used an icepick and heated the tip to make a start for the pretzel stick. Not doing that would have possibly cracked the candy, which would have made it hard for the "handle" to stand up. These were quite a hit.

And finally,  the blood shots, also easy. I bought syringes from an online supplier called Jolly Chef, a box of 60 for about $20. Way more than we needed, but they won't spoil and we can use them in future events. So these, a bottle of cranberry juice, and a sparkling beverage are all that's needed. Fill the hypodermic with the juice, pour the drink (in our case it was either champagne or Sprite), and let the customer "shoot" the "blood" into the drink. Funny and fun!

So there you have all the gritty details, in case you want to try any of these yourself. It took way more time than it should have  to make the first 2 treats, but the last 3 really were easy. I enjoyed doing this, as it's been a long time since I made any party treats. The best thing I did for myself was allowing plenty of time, so that when things didn't go right, I had time to make corrections.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.