Muffin Tin Monday - Halloween Candy

This week's Muffin Tin Monday has no theme. I have a notebook full of fun ideas and was planning on doing a fairy tale themed one for this week. And then I decided I'd try and do Halloween themes for the rest of the month (even though that's next week's theme anyway.) This tin had been my original plan for next week's theme, only I've found some other great ideas to steal try, and want to give myself more time and ingredients to do them with, so they'll look really awesome. So I decided to make food that looked like Halloween candy this week.

Since these usually take me a while, and we'll be going to Chuck E Cheese for lunch on Friday, have fun Halloween plans Saturday morning, and we'll be visiting family all of Sunday; the only times I'd have to make an MTM this week were today for lunch or dinner, or Friday or Saturday for dinner. Plus I have to whip something up for Saturday night's potluck! So I decided to do it for lunch today (Thursday.) Just as I was getting my notes together and heading for the kitchen, we heard the next-door-neighbor girl outside and Z wanted to go over and play. We stayed there and skipped lunch and nap. So much for my MTM plans! But we haven't played over there in a while due to crap weather and busy schedules, so it was worth it to let them play together again. So I banged this out as an early dinner. 

Trick Or Treat Candy

From left to right. Top: "Caramel Apple," Pumpkin candies, Candy Corn.
Bottom: M&M's, Lifesavers, Lollipop

Caramel Apple: I had toyed with the idea of trying to make an apple with a razor blade in it, but couldn't figure out how to do a razor blade decided not to joke about that kind of thing. So I was going to make jellybeans somehow. I had thought about copping out and just using whole olives and calling them jellybeans, but decided to try and make jellybean shapes out of a pluot first. I cut it in half to get started, and it struck me how much it looked like a candied apple. Little Z was off snacking on a treat I got at a Japanese store called Yan-Yan, which is a frosting of some kind that you dip lightly sweetened bread-type sticks into. (Kind of like thicker Pocky sticks, only you dip them, rather than having them pre-dipped.) I snaked one of the sticks from her to use for my candied apple. It didn't look quite right, so I decided to try and put peanut butter on it, to look like caramel. Much better. Except the PB got everywhere on it's muffin tin cup! Ah well.

Pumpkin "Candies": They don't look much like those soft little chewy pumpkin candies (made out of the same stuff as candy corn) but it's all I could think of to try and fill the tin! I sliced a carrot, and the coins were too small for my mini pumpkin cutter, so I hacked them out myself. The carrot had a big split at the top, which made it worse, since then I had to make the 'stem' too long and they looked stupid. Maybe I should have tried to use the split at the bottom somehow, but I couldn't think at the time.

The last few turned out okay, since I used smaller coins without a split in them. I just chopped the rest of the coins in half and tucked them underneath.

Candy Corn: I have a candy corn-shaped cookie cutter, and had planned on doing cream cheese on bread and using carrots and maybe yellow sugar sprinkles to make the colors. But Z has been loving this triangular crisp bread cracker from Ikea, covered in Laughing Cow Garlic & Herb cheese spread, so I thought I'd just use that. I grated some of the carrot (but not enough. But by the time I was ready to assemble, I had already washed off the grater and eaten the carrot remains, so didn't want to bother with it again and just made the orange area smaller than it would normally be on a candy corn.)

Instead of sugar sprinkles, I opted for Colby Jack cheese, which is technically orange, but it looks nice with the carrot to contrast. Good enough!

Lifesavers & Lollipops: I had the idea to use a Babybell cheese and pretzel stick to make a lollipop, but it's pretty boring. I couldn't think of a way to make it look more like one of those swirly rainbow lollipops, and the swirl I tried etching into the other side of the wax was an epic fail, so I left it. I did snip off the pull tabs from the bottom and used my steak knife to hack out a chunk of wax big enough to let the pretzel in, to avoid breakage, but also to avoid jamming wax up into the cheese!
I just used Froot Loops wrapped in a little tin foil to kind of look like a Lifesavers wrapper. I had wanted to try and string them onto a pretzel stick or something, but the stick was too big, and I didn't have any lollipop sticks that weren't currently being used by lollipops, so I just went for the foil. It was tough, as the Loops kept shifting and falling over and being generally annoying as I tried to shape and trim the foil around them.

M&M's: For the 'bag' I cut 2 slices of bread into a rectangle and used my mini 'M' and '3' cutters on the top slice to make an 'M&M' and tried to cut little bits out above the backwards '3' to make it look more like an 'and' symbol. I failed. So I used my tiny tiny circle cutter. I spread PB and Nutella inside as contrast.  

I used slices from the other half of the pluot and used a small circle cutter from one of my bento sets. It wasn't able to punch through the skin, so I ate that slice! (And the rest of the leftovers!)

 M&M's: Red: pluot. Orange: carrot tip. Yellow: CoJack cheese. Green: frozen peas. Brown: raisin halves.

She went for the "M&M's" first, but didn't eat them. She just poked at them to see what they were.

She pinched some shredded cheese off the Candy Corn, then had me unwrap the Babybell cheese. She licked it like a lollipop for a while before using her teeth.

She wasn't very hungry, since her belly was still full of the Yan-Yan and the sand she ate at the neighbor girl's house [Seriously. Not kidding. She was slorping it down by the handful. And crunching it in her teeth. Short of leaving, there was no way of stopping her. She ignored admonitions, threats, and logic. Even reverse psychology failed. "Fine. Eat as much as you want.... Okay, stop eating that." "No! I can eat as muuuuuch as I want!"] She licked off some of the PB/Nutella. She ate the Babybell (but left most of the pretzel stick.) She ate the cracker and cheese segment with the carrots on it, but left the rest. And she tipped over the "caramel apple." Oh yes. But she apparently had room for all of the Froot Loops.

*I got the ghost muffin tin on eBay, and it didn't have a brand-name on it, so no clue who makes it. Plastic creepy-crawlies from the Dollar Tree store.