Halloween DIY: How to Make a Quick and Crafty Witches’ Hats and Broomsticks Snack Tray
Remember that Halloween party your co-worker invited you to this year? No? Well then you're in trouble, because it's going down tonight and you already RSVP'd that you would be bring a snack tray.
With your pantry laid bare and only a few hours until the party, it's safe to say that your options here are pretty limited. You could try to bake some cookies, but we all know how that turned out last time. You could take the lazy way out and just fill a dish with some Halloween candy, or, you could take a little bit of initiative and impress everyone by whipping up an incredibly crafty and super simple Witch's Hat and Broom dessert tray.
Yeah… let's go with that last one.
As far as last-minute party contributions go, you can't do any better than this clever snack tray. The supplies cost less than $15, the assembly time is less than 20 minutes and it looks so darn good that nobody will suspect you spent basically no time creating it. Plus those little witch brooms and hats are like, super cute, right?
So without further ado, here's how you can build one of these creative culinary cop-outs for your next Halloween get-together.
What You'll Need
1x Bag of Pretzel Sticks
1x Bag Reese's Pieces
1x Bag Miniature Peanut Butter Cups (We Used Reese's)
1x Package of Thin Mints, Grasshoppers or similar Chocolate Wafers
1x Bag Hershey's Kisses
1x Bag of Candy Corn
1x Tube Decorative Icing (We Used Wilton's Green Sparkle Decorating Icing)
PRO TIP: This project involves working with chocolate using your bare (clean!) hands. To prevent everything from becoming a melted, sticky mess, we recommend sticking all of the chocolate ingredients – including the cookies – in the refrigerator for 15 minutes before you start building the broomsticks and hats.
Making the Broomsticks
This is so utterly simple that we probably don't even need to give you step-by-step directions. However, we're going to do so anyway because we're cool like that.
1) Unwrap a Reese's Cup and turn it upside down.
2) Using a small knife or a clean, sterilized screwdriver, punch a pilot hole through the bottom of the Reese's Cup. This will prevent the chocolate from breaking apart when you insert the pretzel stick.
3) Insert a pretzel stick.
4) Repeat steps 1-3 until you feel like you have an adequate number of broomsticks to serve to your guests.
Making the Hats
The hats are a little bit trickier to make than the broomsticks, but not by much. Here's how to build them.
1) Grab a cookie.
2) Add a dab of icing to the center of the cookie.
3) Stick on a Hershey's Kiss.
4) Add a ring of icing around the base of the Kiss to create the appearance of a hat band. If you're feeling particularly decorative, add a "ribbon"_x009d_ to the hat by making a trail of icing leading from the base of the Kiss to the edge of the cookie.
5) Repeat steps 1-3 until you're sick of making delicious Witch Hats.
Staging the Tray
Appearance is everything when it comes to serving these snacks at your party. Here's how to stage your dessert tray like a pro.
1) Grab a serving tray. White is ideal, but any neutral color or pattern will work.
2) Spread Candy Corn over one half of the tray.
3) Spread Reese's Pieces over the other.
4) Place the Broomsticks on top of the Reese's Pieces and the Hats on top of the Candy Corn.
5) Serve and enjoy.
Now wasn't that easy? There might be more clever Halloween snack ideas out there, but you won't find anything that's easy to make and looks this good. So grab a few bags of candy and make one for yourself today!
Share Your Awesome Last-Minute Snack Ideas!
Got an idea for an awesome last-minute dessert tray like this one? Share it with us in a comment, on our Facebook Page or through Twitter! If it's really cool we'll mention it in a blog post or share it on our social networks.
Until next time,
The CandyStore.com Team