Halloween Candy Cookies

Happy Halloween!  I hope you had a spook-tacular day.  But you know what’s really scary (other than a snow storm in October)?  That huge pile of Halloween candy.  If you’re anything like us, you bought way too much.  Add that to the piles the kids collect, and it’s candy overload.  Or at least it will be next week, once we get our make-up Halloween.

Luckily, Kristina Greene shared a few tips for us in her .  One of her ideas was to make cookies using leftover Halloween candy.  That sounded like a great idea to me, so I spent the past week trying out different cookie recipes with added Halloween candy.  Yes, that was a pretty awesome way to spend the week!

I’m sharing what my family and I decided was our favorite Halloween Candy Cookie recipe.  I used a variety of candy bars—you can see the wrappers in one of the photos above.  Feel free to try out any chocolate-type candy bars.  I did notice that the caramel had a tendency to bubble out of the cookies and get a little burnt around the edges before the cookie was done, so you may want to skip candy bars with caramel.  Or not.  It was easy to break off those pieces, though one of my sons absolutely loved the slightly burnt caramel pieces and ate those instead of cookies.  One man’s over-cooked melted caramel trash is another’s tasty treasure!  I also must admit that I used candies with rice crispies and cookies in the chocolate, and we weren’t able to find or taste any of those in the cookies.  It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but just know that if you use a whole bunch of Nestle Crunch bars and Kit Kats, it’s pretty much the same as using plain chocolate.

You’ll need 2 cups of chopped candy for this recipe.  If you run short, just throw in enough chocolate chips to make up the difference.  But who am I kidding?  I could probably make 5 or 6 batches of these cookies before I ran out of candy!  Kristina also suggests freezing leftover Halloween candy.  Cut it up and freeze it in 2 cup batches and you can pull it out in a month or so to make Christmas cookies!

Ingredients:

• 2 ¼ cup flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• ½ cup sugar
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 cups chopped chocolate Halloween candy, mixed varieties (hint:  some of those little bars can be surprising hard to chop!  Use a large knife to make the job easier.  And don't forget to UpCycle those wrappers!)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda.  If you don’t have a sifter, just stir it all up with a wire whisk.
3. Cream together the softened butter, brown sugar, and sugar until well blended.  Add the eggs and vanilla and mix well.
4. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and stir until well combined.  If you are doing it by hand, you probably want to add the flour a little at a time, but if you’re using a stand mixer, feel free to add it all at once.
5. Using a rubber spatula or large spoon, fold in the chopped Halloween candy until it’s evenly distributed in the cookie dough.
6. Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto a cookie sheet, leaving space between cookies.  Bake for about 9-11 minutes, until lightly browned.  Let cool for a few minutes on the pan then remove to wire cooling racks.

This recipe makes approximately 4 dozen cookies.