After the giddiness of hanging out all night, endlessly talking about your costume or stuffing yourself with the kids’ candy, as with anything payment for over indulgence is now due. You’ve eaten so much candy that you’re sick of it and now plan to dump the leftovers off on your coworkers. ‘Yea, I’ll bring it the office they’ll eat anything.’ The candy is free and in these hard economic times there’s no need to just give it away without it benefiting you. Make cookies out of them. Impress your friends, coworkers and neighbors with your newfound Martha Stewart ingenuity and skills. There might be a promotion in your future or save yourself from being downsized. Who would fire someone who brings fresh baked goods to work?
The other day, I watched one of those goofy local how-to-be-a-hip-Angeleno programs and they suggested the way to make cookies from Halloween spoils is to buy cookie dough and throw your candy corn, Hershey’s miniatures and hot tamales in the dough and bake it. That’s too many conflicting chemicals and sounds god-awful. Just as well jump in the cooling waters of San Onofre Nuclear power plant if it’s chemicals you want.
In the time it would take you to drive to Traders, find parking and buy cookie dough you could have googled peanut butter or chocolate chip cookie recipe, mixed it together and baked the cookies. It’s a better use of your time to make the dough yourself. There’s nothing worse than spending the money and time to cut out cookies from prepacked dough for them only to turn out tasting worse than something my dog crapped out. Instead make it yourself it’s cheaper in the long run and tastier.
First, google chocolate chip or peanut butter cookie recipe. Pick one. I’m partial to peanut butter. If you have allergies use the chocolate chip. Without looking at it, I can guess it will be 2 sticks of butter, 1 cup of sugar, another cup of brown sugar, 2 eggs, throw in some vanilla (I never measure vanilla) around 2 1/2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda and 1/4 teaspoon salt. For the peanut butter recipe, remove one stick of butter and add 1 cup of peanut butter. This is only a guesstimate. But I’m pretty damn close. This is a basic formula for most cookie recipes. Chefs replace ingredients with others to make it more specific.
Now from your candy stash, take out the choice miniature bars–milky ways, snickers, mars, krackel any chocolate bar. If it’s the fun size, cut it in half. You want roughly a square measuring 1 x 1 inch. Take the cookie dough that you mixed up and envelop the bar in dough, just enough to cover the entire bar. Roll between both palms into a round ball.
Put the ball on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 375 for 10 to 12 minutes. Start checking at 8 minutes and bake until lightly brown. It’s more like the lightest spray on tan color you’d request at the tanning salon. When they reach the desired color, let them cool on the pan for 2 minutes then take them off to cool on a wire rack.
Now bite into the warm cookie and taste the melted chocolate bar mingling with the moist cookie crumb. No chemical aftertaste from store bought cookie dough here. No flavors clashing. You won’t eat just one. Break out the milk and now you have a Halloween after party that’s better than a bag full of leftover candy. Now see if they make to the office.
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