"halloweencandy" news and stories

The National Confectioners Association lives in a world of candy all year long. What do they do at the office to celebrate the day devoted to candy? I would expect much revelry and perhaps even the day off of work. There would be lots and lots of free candy for all employees - maybe even candy flying out of windows onto the streets!

According to the Candy Dish Blog (the official blog of the National Confectioners Association), they have a pot luck lunch. I'm a bit disappointed with this news. However, at least someone brought in a cake laden with candy. As you can see in the photo, there is lots of candy all around the cake. Thanks goodness!

Does your workplace have them beaten? What are you doing today?

When I was in the fourth grade, my mother handed out travel-sized tubes of sparkly, bubble gum flavored toothpaste on Halloween instead of candy. That night, several kids turned her down flat and one particularly outspoken ghost picked up a tube, took a look at it and tossed it back in the bowl, shouting, "Hey! That's not candy!" After that, she returned to mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and snack-sized candy bars (in the days before "fun" size). We spent years using up that awful toothpaste.

During my adult years, I've never lived in a place where trick or treaters come to the door, so I've never had the fun of picking out candy and opening the door to decked out princesses and eye-patched pirates (sadly though, I've consumed more than my share of Halloween candy in those same years). This year, I'm hoping to live vicariously through the Halloween experiences of Slashfood readers.

What kind of candy are you handing out this year? Has the tightening economy impacted the contents of your Halloween bowl? Do you typically buy the same candy year after year, or do you like to mix it up?

When I think of Halloween, I think about candied apples, candy corn, and chocolates. This holiday drives my sweet tooth crazy!

One of my favorite activities during every holiday is discovering the many festive ways to celebrate using food. With all the candy you can want at your disposal, Halloween is the perfect time to concoct sweet gastronomical delights. Whether or not you're going to a Halloween party, you won't want to miss these fun delicious candy creations and ornaments:

1. Candied apples
2. Haunted gingerbread house
3. Owl brownie pops
4. Pumpkin brownie pops
5. Caramel-dipped apples
6. Bat and cobweb cookies
   
7. Martha Stewart's boo-tiful cake
8. Shrunken pears

What are some of your favorite homemade sweets during Halloween?

Though the sharing of treats on All Hallow's Eve traces back to the holiday's roots as an ancient celebration, Trick or Treating is a phenomenon of the distinctly American holiday of Halloween. Though trick or treating is at least a century old, defining the treat as candy is relatively new: as recently as the World War Two era, the treat was likely to be a doughnut, a sip of cider, even an apple (imagine trying to get away with that today!).

Even with the advent of widespread manufacturing, candy-making was as expected a part of a homemaker's repertoire as canning. Around Halloween time, a homemaker sometimes spent days in the kitchen, rattling glass thermometers and pouring vials of exotic oils, in order to fill small waxed-paper bags with the house specialty (each cook was expected to have one): chewy nougats, bright sour balls, snowy vanilla drops, tinted coconut patties, home-dunked chocolate cherries, snapping shards of praline, hand-pulled taffy, and, of course, fudge.

Oh, sure, in the rich part of town, fancy ladies doled out the local confectioner's lollipops and jelly beans (and the occasional rum ball for a determinedly cheerful chaperone), but in the move to consumer culture many of these concoctions migrated to Easter baskets. In some of our minds, Halloween shall always belong to old-fashioned treats. Here is a sampling of online resources for retro treats (and perhaps a couple of tricks!).

If you're trick or treating with the kids tonight, chances are you're going to have either a.) your kids eating a ton of candy and getting sick or hyper, or b.) enough candy to last the next 38 days. Besides eating the candy bar by bar, piece by piece, what else can you do with it?

How about a Leftover Candy Cake? This recipe from CDKitchen takes all of your leftover candy, whether it's chocolate or hard candies and makes it into a bundt cake. Check out the ingredients and the instructions after the jump.