5 Uses for all that Halloween Candy

Now that Halloween’s over and you’ve got bags and bags of candy in your house what are you supposed to do with it all? Sure, you could let your kids eat it all ‘til they’re buried under a mountain of shiny, waxy wrapper, but that just feels like bad parenting.

Here’s five ideas for all the sweetness. And yes, most of them do still involve eating the candy, but just in a different way. I mean, afterall, it’s candy.  Throw out the candy canes (you know those are leftover from last Christmas) and the bubble gum (which is always stale and/or hard) and then gather the rest for these little treats.

1. Put it in the kids’ lunches with sappy/corny/sweet notes on them.  Maybe they’ll have a good laugh right before that big math test.

2. Save it for Christmas gingerbread houses.

3. Bake them into cookies and brownies in the place of chocolate chips – M&M’s, Reese’s pieces, broken candy bars, Reese’s mini-cups. Or sprinkle them on top.

4. Make your own chocolate bark with Hershey’s bars, pretzels, nuts. Easy instructions are here in this post about chocolate, but with candy bars, you’ll have to put them in the refrigerator for them to harden again, otherwise they will stay melty (the way they do in your purse when you’ve forgotten you stashed one in there).

5. Donate it to charity or trade it in with your local dentist/orthodontist who will send it to soldiers abroad or a local charity.

And after you’ve done all that, put the rest in a pretty jar on the counter and hope your friends & visitors will eat them.

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