There are many ways to make fudge that start out with some sugar and a candy thermometer, and while I’ve had plenty of excellent fudge made this way, I’ve also ruined more than a few batches by not watching the temperature closely enough. The idea of a worry-free fudge, therefore, appeals to me. And, fortunately, it is very easy to make a delicious batch of fudge with virtually no effort at all.

This fudge recipe starts with semisweet chocolate and sweetened condensed milk - and those two ingredients make up the bulk of the recipe, with just a little butter and a little vanilla to round things out. All the fudge ingredients are combined in a a double boiler and melted together. You can actually do this in a large saucepan instead of a double boiler, but you will need to stir constantly to prevent the chocolate from scorching (the pan will get quite hot where the burners make contact) as everything melts together.

To make the fudge more interesting, I turned it into a big batch of s’mores by stirring in marshmallows and chopped graham crackers. They help break up the intensity of the chocolate a bit, so you get a nice mixture of rich chocolate, chewy marshmallow and crisp crackers. It’s a great variation on a s’more. Mini marshmallows are already the “right” size for this recipe, but it is very easy to cut large marshmallows (or homemade ‘mallows) into quarters with a pair of scissors and stir them in instead.

Store these in an airtight container to keep the graham cracker bits nice and crisp. The fudge will taste best within the first few days it is made. I try to keep the pieces medium-sized, but you cut cut them down to bite-size squares to serve a crowd.

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Peppermint bark is a holiday staple - or, at least, it appears in quite a few stores and a package always seems to make its way under my tree around Christmas. It’s easy to make it yourself and it makes a great holiday gift, as well as being a good treat to put out when guests stop by for snacks and hot cocoa. It is basically a layer or two of chocolate that has crushed peppermints added to the top. The combination of crunchy mint and creamy chocolate is a good one.

But as much as I enjoy crushed candy canes, big chunks of mint can be a little bit too crunchy for my tastes. This year, I topped my peppermint bark off with crushed Peppermint JoJo’s, the Trader Joe’s brand Oreo look-a-like. I’ve used these cookies before in Peppermint Cookies n’ Cream Brownies with great results. They’re crisp, have a nice creamy center and have just enough flecks of real peppermint candy in the filling. They make a great topping for this chocolate bark with all of those different textures!

My chocolate base has three layers, with dark, milk and white chocolate. Each layer must be chilled before adding the next layer, so make sure to allow some chilling time when you set out to make this. Also, use good quality chocolates (I like Dove, Ghiradelli and Guittard) because the chocolate is the most important element of this dessert and it just won’t be the same if you use the cheap stuff.

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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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