By Maire Crooks, The Current Co-Editor-in-Chief
Two weeks after Halloween, we are all tired of looking at the ginormous bowl of candy leftover from the severely disappointing turnout of trick-or-treaters. I have already mentally moved on to Thanksgiving and the winter holiday season, and cannot bear to think about ghosts and goblins anymore.
Thus, I attempted to transform my family’s leftover candy into something much more enjoyable: cookies. I have seen the recipe on social media for years, and decided that I had to try it. (spoiler: it did not go well)
My baking journey started off smoothly; I chopped up my candy of choice: M&Ms, Kit-Kats, Milky Ways, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Twix. Then I began to mix the batter, adding in my butter, sugar, vanilla, and eggs.
Next came the flour, and this is where things started to go wrong. The recipe called for 2-2.5 cups of flour, so I carefully added two. I debated on adding closer to 2.5, but I knew I hate dry cookies and opted to potentially have them on the doughy side to avoid that problem. This was a mistake; they definitely needed that extra half cup!
I mixed in the chopped candies with no incident, and spooned out the two tablespoons of dough onto my cookie sheet. I arrived at my second mishap of the day; I placed my cookies too close together on the baking sheet. My go-to cookies I normally make do not spread out much when baking, so I foolishly assumed the same for this recipe. I was wrong. When baked, all of my cookies ran together to form one large sheet of sweets.
The error that put the nail in the coffin was actually my choice of Halloween candy to include. The melted caramel from the Twix and Milky Ways stuck to my cookie sheet, making it impossible to scrape the baked goods off in one piece. This also ruined the way the cookies baked; they could not bake evenly due to some still sitting on the hot pan while I wrestled with the first few to get them on my cooling mat. For future interactions, I would definitely avoid sticky, caramel candy and stick to simple chocolate confections.
My failed baking attempt
Despite all of these mishaps, I still had one glimmer of hope: the taste. I knew the cookies looked bad, but they must be delicious, right? Wrong. In my opinion, the candy made them way too sweet and overpowered any other flavor within the dough. The batter itself calls for two full cups of sugar, plus all of the sugar in the candy on top of that. I appreciated the notes of peanut butter and caramel to divide up the one-note flavor profile, but ultimately, that was not enough to save my review of the recipe.
Although I do not recommend baking cookies to utilize your leftover Halloween candy, I was able to compile a short list of other things to put the sweets to use instead.
Many recommend donating candy to soldiers overseas. There are multiple places that accept candy to send to our troops, and many dentists also have a similar donation program.
There are many other treats that can be made with your candy, hopefully with better luck than I had. Mixing candy into vanilla ice cream is popular, and it is said to cut the sweetness of the candy for those without a strong sweet tooth.
I would like to encourage everyone to try my failed recipe if they wish, and hopefully it will fare better than it did for me. Oversee, I recommend trying out a few of the other suggestions I gathered to stay on the safe side.