Thursday, 26 October 2023

Halloween Chocolate Bark

If your children have been trick or treating, or you stocked up on goodies to hand out yourself, you might find you have an excess of chocolate and sweets left over come November. While it’s perfectly acceptable to still be eating it come January, with Christmas not that far off you might be looking for ways to use up this leftover chocolate and candy. 

Chocolate bark is a good option as it’s easy to make, and fun to do with kids, plus it makes fairly banal sweets or chocolates into something a bit more interesting.

Simply melt some chocolate, spread it over a piece of baking paper in a square cake tin or rectangular baking tray, sprinkle with sweets, chocolates (M&Ms and Smarties work well), popcorn, even broken biscuit pieces, and leave to set in the fridge. When set, break into slabs (you may need to carefully stab with a knife) and enjoy.

For mine I used a baking tray and 200g white chocolate and 100g milk chocolate. I melted both types of chocolate separately in the microwaved and coloured half the white chocolate purple and the other half orange. I swirled the three colours together in the tray and sprinkled over some M&S Hallow-Scream Munch Mix, £3.50 for 300g (I used about 100g). The mix contains mini pretzel pieces, chocolate covered pretzels, green and orange crispies (like little biscuit pieces in a candy coating), popcorn pieces covered in white chocolate and milk chocolate pretzel clusters - though I didn’t use the latter in my chocolate bark as the pieces were a lot larger than the others.

This could be enjoyed as part of a Halloween party or nibbled on while watching your favourite scary movie!


The recipe can be adapted easily for other times of the year such as Christmas, or Valentine’s Day as I did here (this is my other blog if you are interested in parenting posts)! 



Wednesday, 25 October 2023

Halloween Spooky Sugar Cookies


I recently did a class with Biscuiteers which I shall write about separately - and since then I've been enjoying baking and decorating biscuits at home, now I know the 'proper' techniques for decorating! The trick is to use royal icing to pipe an outline, then when it has set, use thinner royal icing to 'flood' the inner part of the biscuit.

I have a large collection of cookie cutters and among them, a pumpkin, ghost and bat. I used a Biscuiteers recipe which you can find online here - the addition of golden syrup makes the dough less likely to spread during baking.

I tried a few different designs, including writing 'Boo' on a ghost, and a pumpkin with a face - but I prefer the look of the plain pumpkin cookies. I think the bats came out fairly well too. I made a few of each type and plan to serve these when my daughter has a couple of friends around for a mini Halloween party - if they aren't eaten already before then!