Halloween is synonymous with candy displays appearing in every supermarket. It’s no secret that most of these contain an abhorrent amount of sugar, but even with health trends rising, candy is too much of an integral part of the holiday for it to wane in popularity.
Nonetheless, healthy versions of everyone’s favorite Halloween candies populate the internet – for example, healthy “Snickers”: a peanut-butter-filled date dipped in chocolate. While it closely imitates the peanut butter and chocolate flavors of the original candy, I highly doubt it would be an accurate replication. So purely for fun, I tried to recreate popular Halloween candies from scratch, with no regard to healthifying them.
Twix
Twix is one of the superior chocolate candies out there. It consists of a crisp shortbread cookie and gooey caramel, encased in milk chocolate. My methodology for this was:
- Bake a slab of shortbread.
- Make caramel sauce, pour it over the shortbread slab and refrigerate them together.
- Cut into Twix-size bars.
- Dip into tempered milk chocolate.
I did these steps exactly as planned, with one exception: dipping the whole bar into the chocolate was difficult, so I only dipped the bottom, placed it down on parchment paper, then spooned chocolate over it to cover the rest of the bar. I did the same for the Snickers (below).
I found shortbread and caramel sauce recipes online and used a bar of milk chocolate. As long as you’re happy with the taste of the three components, these bars should taste good.
Snickers
I don’t even like Snickers because the caramel is too sticky, but I thought it would be fun to make because of the many components – and I could make the caramel less sticky, to my taste. These contain nougat, roasted peanuts, caramel, and a chocolate coating.
Intended methodology:
- Make slab of nougat
- Make caramel and refrigerate it into a slab topped with roasted peanuts
- Stack nougat and caramel on top of each other
- Cut into bars
- Coat with milk chocolate
What I actually did:
- Make the Twix bars, except I added peanuts on top of the shortbread slab
This Snickers recreation became very inaccurate because all I did was add peanuts to the Twix. The original Snickers bars don’t actually contain shortbread. This was an error on my part but I chose to see it as an invention of a new candy bar – peanut caramel shortbread chocolate bars, which I haven’t seen done before. It still tasted good and that’s all that matters – just make sure to not skimp on caramel (my friend told me there wasn’t enough).
Reese’s
Peanut butter and chocolate are an amazing combination, and Reese’s embodies just that. The classic Reese’s cup is made of milk chocolate with sweetened peanut filling inside. I decided to recreate this using Claire Saffitz’s recipe.
Claire Saffitz’s method:
- Heat sugar syrup to 248 F degrees
- Pour into peanut butter + salt + vanilla (I omitted the vanilla because Reese’s doesn’t contain any)
- Mix until it becomes a ball
- Shape into discs (you can roll the mixture out and cut out circles, or roll into balls then flatten)
- Use cupcake liners to create a milk chocolate cup with the peanut butter discs inside
This was much easier than expected. The sugar syrup wasn’t a hassle at all – a thermometer was helpful.
To truly replicate Reese’s, make sure not to make the peanut patties too thick. I made hefty discs, resulting in very thick cups, and was told that there was too much filling. Reese’s actually contains less peanut filling than you would imagine, so less is more.
Overall, this was a fun project but was kind of time consuming and pretty costly. It took about 2 hours, split over 2 days. I mostly used ingredients I had on hand but did spend 10 dollars on cream and chocolate, which I used about half of, all to get 12 pieces of candy. Making your Halloween candy at home is definitely pricier than buying factory produced ones in bulk, so contrary to most cases, going from scratch won’t save you money.
Despite the inefficiency, the process was extremely fun and the results were very satisfying. Producing little chocolates containing fun fillings inside gave me a lot of pleasure. I also think the quality of the caramel, the shortbread, the peanut filling, and the chocolate (I used a Trader Joe’s Pound Plus milk chocolate bar) were much better in the homemade version and the upgrade in taste was apparent. If you have the time, this is an activity worth doing – especially since you could customize them as much as you’d like. Different coatings (like various kinds of chocolate), different fillings (flavored caramel, various nuts, literally anything you want to be enveloped in chocolate) and decoration options (sprinkles on top!) – there’s so much potential. The possibilities of homemade candy bar-making are truly endless.