Candy Bark With Leftover Halloween Candy
My kids had so much Halloween candy this year. We camp seasonally in Maine and the campground has two full Halloween weekends. Technically the first weekend is considered a Harvest weekend but it has trick or treating. There are about a thousand campsites and almost everyone participates – two weekends in a row.
At home when the kids trick or treat they hit maybe ten houses – imagine hitting 2,000 houses! I brought a full duffle bag of candy to work for everyone and still the kids didn’t even notice it was missing. Then I would continue to bring in a little at a time and we weren’t really making any significant progress to seeing it all disappear.
This weekend we turned all the chocolate pieces of candy, into candy bark. I made three huge batches and froze it all (after they had a tiny bit). Now the bark will last a really long time and since it isn’t right in front of them on the kitchen table I am hoping it will also be out of mind for a while. There still is candy there though since I only used all the chocolate pieces. The rest is lollipops, Smarties, Nerds, Twizzlers etc…
To make the bark we used Wilton Candy Melts and a Wilton Electric Melting Pot. There are alot of ways you can melt chocolate but I find this to be the best. It seems to provide the most consistent result and is extremely easy to get smooth chocolate. You can also use any flavor chocolate you’d like – we stuck with a cocoa.
While you are waiting for the candy melts to melt, start cutting up all the different candies you’d like to include in your bark. You don’t need to limit it to just candy – you can add broken pretzels, nuts, seeds, raisins etc…
We melt our chocolates in our melting pot. We place a silcone baking sheet onto a cookie sheet and once the chocolate has melted we spread it out on the silicone sheet – in a medium layer. You want the chocolate to hold the candy so it can’t be too thin, but you also don’t want the melted chocolate to be too thick and swallow up all the candy. On a side note, I highly recommend silicone baking sheets – I never have to scrub cookie sheets or pans anymore. Everything is removed from these sheets effortlessly with no cooking spray or anything!
Spread your broken bits of candy (or other treats) all along the bark. It is random, doesn’t need to be even and just have fun with it. Place the cookie sheet in the fridge for about 15 minutes. Remove from the fridge, remove the huge slab of chocolate from the baking sheet and start breaking apart with your hands into random chunks and sizes.
There you have it – Halloween Candy Bark!
