Inspiration Challenge: October {Halloween Candy}

Ellie went with my in-laws to the farm across from our neighborhood and came home with a pumpkin. That alone doesn’t necessarily say it’s Halloween time, but she immediately asked if she could paint it to look like a vampire. That’s when I realized, it is October 1st. Official Halloween season!

For our October challenge, Melissa (Simply Sweets by Honeybee) and I challenged everyone to make their favorite Halloween candy into a cookie. We also challenged each other to make a candy other than candy corn. There is only one candy out there that I can eat by the handful. Fortunately, this candy comes in a Halloween version (also a Christmas version, a Valentines version, and an Easter version. Hmmm. Why no Fourth of July version, I wonder?).

Not only can I eat M&Ms by the handful, but my kids have proven that you can eat the cookies version by the handful, too.

If you need your own M&M cookies to eat by the handful, this is what you need to do. Start by cutting out your chocolate dough (I use this recipe by LilaLoa) using the bottom opening of an icing tip. Next, bake and cool your cookies, then mix your colors.

By trial and error, I found that the easiest way to coat the cookies was to drop them into a bowl of icing (about a 3-5 second consistency), mix them up well, then scoop them out with a small spoon and push them off of the spoon with a toothpick. This method was definitely a lot less messy than my first attempt to put the cookies on my cooling rack and pour the icing over them! Let your cookies dry overnight. They were a little difficult to remove from the cooling rack, so in the future, I would probably let them dry on a parchment lined cookie sheet. After your icing is completely dry, use a small “m” (or letter of your choice) stamp and white food coloring to stamp on that “m”.

I also made a peanut version, because I can eat peanut M&Ms even faster than plain.

I wrapped a bit of cookie dough around a peanut before baking. LilaLoa’s recipe held its shape really well and I was so happy with the way these turned out. If I’d thought they would turn out so well, I probably would have made an almond, and a pretzel version to!

I really can’t wait to see what Melissa came up with, so lets head over to her page to see. While you are there, you can also link up your Halloween candy cookies! Or you can leave a link in my comments section. I’d love to see what everyone comes up with!

Then start thinking about next month’s cookies. We want to see “Your State”. Texas and New Jersey are two of the most stereotyped states, I will NOT be making a “Snookie Cookie”. Although this one by Arty McGoo  almost makes me proud to live in the same state that show takes place in!  🙂  If you don’t live in the Unites States, show us where you do live. I can’t wait to have fun with this one!