In 1971, General Mills released two Halloween cereals: Count Chocula and Franken Berry. The former was a chocolate cereal and the later was strawberry flavored. These two cereals are still popular today and have an almost cult following as far as cereals go, largely because you can almost only find them around Halloween (I hear some stores stock them year round) and need to wait around the rest of the year if you’re a fan! As a kid, I would munch on these cereals dry as a snack, enjoying the sweet cereal pieces and marshmallow bits that were mixed in. When I saw a display featuring these cereals, I decided to relive a bit of the past - and get in the Halloween spirit - by picking up a box of Franken Berry.

The cereal is just as I remembered. It is vivid red with bat and ghost marshmallows throughout. It’s sweet, but not over the top, and has a good, if artificial, strawberry flavor. I almost poured a bowl for breakfast, but decided that a brightly colored cereal bar would be a more fun use for it.

These are basically Rice Krispy Treats made with Franken Berries. They’re strawberry flavored and have a great red color to them. And while I can’t say that I’d eat them every day, they’re fun to make, tasty and are a big hit with kids (especially the ones around here!).

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The folks at Betty Crocker invited me to try and come up with a spooky Halloween recipe using some of the General Mills cereals this year. At first, I wasn’t sure that I could do it. Cereals? What can you do with those besides make rice krispie treats and similar marshmallow bars? But I accepted the challenge and set about trying to come up with a more unusual way to use cereal in some kind of Halloween treat.

What I settled on was these Spooky Peanut Butter Puff Truffles. The centers of these peanut butter and chocolate truffles are made with a surprise ingredient: Reese’s Puffs cereal! The truffle balls are dipped into white chocolate and decorated with semisweet chocolate features to give them a very ghostly appearance. Spooky on the outside, sweet on the inside!

If you’ve ever had Peanut Butter Puffs cereal, or seen it in the store, you’ll know that it’s inspired by Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs candies. They also taste pretty much just like candy, so I wanted to keep that peanut butter candy flavor going. The centers are made with the peanut butter cereal, cream cheese and peanut butter. The two softer ingredients help to hold the crushed up cereal together, but have mild enough flavors that you can still taste the peanut butter candy flavor of the cereal itself. Obviously, the peanut butter boosts the flavor and the candy shell just makes it that much more of a Halloween treat.

I hand-dipped the truffles, since I felt it gave the truffles a better look than trying to give them a smooth outer coating. Use a toothpick to draw on the eyes and mouths of the ghosts. It’s actually a very easy way to decorate the ghosts, plus you don’t need to be extremely precise since you want the ghosts to look spooky.

If you want to play with some cereal yourself, or try this recipe, you can submit photos to Betty Crocker’s Spooktackular Gallery where they’ll showcase your results!

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When you stick to a holiday’s “theme” colors - red and green for Christmas, pink and red for Valentine’s Day - it makes it much easier to come up with treats to make in celebration. These Red, White and Blue Chocolate Dipped Strawberries incorporate both the colors of the 4th of July holiday and fresh, in-season strawberries. They look extremely patriotic, as far as strawberries go, and taste like summer.

Just like any other chocolate-dipped strawberries, the method for making these is very easy. There is only one additional step: dip the tips of the strawberries into some blue sprinkles or blue sanding sugar once they have been dipped into the chocolate. Blue sprinkles or jimmies have a bold color to them and look cute on the strawberries, but blue sanding sugar, which I used for the strawberries here, gives the berries a little bit of a sparkle. The color of the sprinkles will not stand out well on milk or dark chocolate, and you won’t get the same visual effect as you do with white chocolate. That said, if you really want to incorporate milk or dark chocolate, just double dip the berries first into the chocolate of your choice, let that layer set up, and continue on with the white chocolate and sprinkles.

Store the berries in the refrigerator until you’re ready to eat them, as white chocolate is a little more heat-sensitive than other chocolates. The berries are best within a day or two of being made.
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The best thing about baking a batch of cookies with macadamia nuts in them, like White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies or Macadamia Oatmeal Lace Cookies, is that you’re left with a bunch of macadamia nuts to use up in other recipes. Macadamia nuts can be kind of pricey, so they’re not necessarily something I keep on hand all the time, but their buttery flavor and crunch go so well with so many dishes, I really enjoy having them around the kitchen to use here and there.

Sometimes I use chopped macadamia nuts as an ice cream topping, standing in for the peanuts often used in a hot fudge sundae, and here I used them to finish off some strawberries I dipped in milk chocolate.

You don’t really need a recipe to make these, especially if you don’t mind having some extra strawberries, chocolate and macadamia nuts around. You can just eyeball it (or look below for some estimates). Melt some chocolate, dip as many berries as you can, then sprinkle the berries with (or dip them into) coarsely chopped nuts. The flavor of the macadamias goes very well with the milk chocolate and really makes the otherwise simple treat into something a little bit more special.

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One of the easiest - and tastiest - candies to make at home is chocolate peanut butter cups. You can use anything from a mini muffin tin to little candy wrappers, which are sold at craft stores, to shape the chocolate. Once the chocolate is set, all you need to do is pipe in a peanut butter filling, cover the open end with more chocolate and you’re all set. The idea is open to all kinds of variations and, much like regular chocolate companies, I decided to treat myself to an Easter edition of this treat!

I used some small plastic Easter eggs (about 2-inches high) as molds for these candies. Since I wanted a relatively sturdy, I used a small spoon to spread melted chocolate around the sides of the eggs, while I might have used a small brush for smaller candies. The shells were chilled, then I piped a peanut butter filling into the middle before sealing them up with more melted chocolate. The finished chocolates came out as half-eggs, but were easily sandwiched together by using a hot knife (butter knife held over the stove) to smooth the flat ends and soften the chocolate, allowing me to stick them together.

I used dark chocolate for these eggs, although milk and/or semisweet will work well, too. I also used natural, salted peanut butter for the centers. If your peanut butter is not salted or is on the sweet side, add a pinch of salt to the filling to balance the flavors. The number of eggs you get depends on the size of your molds, so keep that in mind if you want to create a specific number of chocolate peanut butter eggs.

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One of the easiest sweet treats to make is a rice krispy treat. The basic recipe has only three ingredients - marshmallows, rice krispies (or other puffed rice cereal) and butter - and takes only a couple of minutes to mix together. As a marshmallow fan, I like them plain, but as a fan of easy to make treats, I appreciate how versatile these bars are. You can make them chocolate-flavored or dip them in chocolate, you can use other types of cereal in place of the plain rice cereal, and you can even use the bars as a base for a no-bake candy bar, as I did with this batch.

These rice krispies are topped with a layer of peanut butter and a layer of chocolate, giving them a rich peanut butter cup flavor that is a great contrast for the sweet, crunchy base. The peanut butter (I used a natural pb, but a national brand will work well here, too) layer is very slightly crumbly, much more similar to the interior of a peanut butter cup than to a layer of unadulterated peanut butter. The topping is a chocolate ganache, made with semisweet chocolate and butter.

The only time consuming piece of this snack is that you need to let the layers set up one by one. Even so, you can probably get it done start to finish in an hour - and the hands-on time is probably about 5-10 minutes. They’re a great treat to make with kids and are probably just as likely to be a hit with (adult) coworkers if there are any leftover to be taken into the office.

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