Bites of heaven: painted chocolate shells
filled with pumpkin-spiced chocolate
ganache. Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE
NIBBLE.

Halloween candy means different things to different people. To us, it means tasting the wares of our favorite artisan chocolatiers, to see what magical seasonal accents they’ve created.

If you’re looking for the finest chocolates for Halloween, you can’t do better than John & Kira’s, a former NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week as well as this week’s pick.

The chocolatier’s signature silky ganaches in 62% cacao Valrhona shells are just right for a gourmet chocolate Halloween.

It’s difficult to choose among Apple Spice, Chocolate Orange and Chocolate Pumpkin bonbons; so if the budget allows, get them all!

Check out the full review, along with this week’s recipe and cooking video.

Does chocolate have a sinister side? For sure! At Sweetly Demented Chocolate, it’s creepy and it’s kooky, mysterious and spooky.

There are white chocolate skulls filled with chocolate ganache, with brains that are filled with raspberry ganache. There are standalone brains, red-colored white chocolate filled with chocolate ganache.

Sink your teeth into some eerie Bye Bye Birdie hawk skulls. The jumbo swirl Hypno Pops, white and dark chocolate filled swirled together and filled with ganache, are the kind that Pugsley Addams would enjoy.

For the merely off-kilter, there is a large silver buck’s antler (edible luster dust over chocolate) and plaques of chocolate “wood.” And some rose-garnished chocolate mementos for Miss Havisham.

Tim Burton should give them as party favors. Sharon Osboyrne should give an assortment to Ozzie. And you can buy some for anyone who likes a tasty bite of the odd or morbid.

“Cerebraloscopy” is white chocolate. Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

Sweetly Demented Chocolate is the work of Sivonne Imnotelling, an artist with a background in sculpture, art and photography, who trained in chocolate at the French Culinary institute.

She hand-created the candy molds from actual deer antlers, hawk skulls and her own clay sculptures and uses Peter’s Chocolate, a quality chocolate popular with many chocolatiers and pastry chefs.

One other demented fact: There is no e-commerce on the website, or pricing either (although we found elsewhere that one two-inch brain sells for $6.00. If you want to sink your teeth into sinister chocolate, you’ll need to use the Contact form on SweetlyDemented.com.

If you’re a web designer/coder, offer to update Ms. Imnotelling’s website in exchange for chocolate. We’d like it to be easier for fans of this chocolate genre to purchase her work.

If you love peanut butter, you may have the same reaction we do when we hear of someone with a peanut allergy: “I’m so sorry.”

Those who know the joys of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or peanut butter cups empathize with those who can’t have them.

But everyone can have sunflower butter!

Sunflower butter is a smooth spread that looks and tastes almost identical to peanut butter. It’s made from sunflower seeds and is completely peanut- and tree nut-free.

It’s healthier than PB, with one-third less saturated fat and 27% of a day’s recommended allowance of vitamin E, along with a much higher iron and fiber content (but 25% less protein).

In jars, it’s available in the same variations as peanut butter: creamy, crunchy, natural, organic, unsweetened, even individual snack-size packs. Sunflower butter is also an ingredient in snack foods that previously relied on peanut butter, including energy bars, granola bars and peanut butter cups.

All the lusciousness of peanut butter cups with no nuts whatsoever! Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

Sun Cups are chocolate cups filled with sunflower butter instead of PB. They’re made by Seth Ellis Chocolatier in Boulder, Colorado.

They resemble Reese’s peanut butter cups, with a similar flavor (there’s just a hint of sunflower seed tanginess).

How Sun Cups Differ From Peanut Butter Cups

Now that she’s a mom, says the cook in the video, she’s become “notorious for sneaking vegetables into everything.”

But we don’t think butternut squash needs to be “sneaked” into the recipe. We love the idea of this seasonal mac and cheese.

For added flourishes to the recipe in the video, how about:

 
More Mac & Cheese
After you’ve watched the video below, check out:

Image: Sautéeing the thyme and grated onion in butter and olive oil to make the squash sauce.

Use a decorative gourd as a food garnish.
Photo by FunWithFood | IST.

We enjoy decorating with gourds in the fall-to-winter months.

From still lifes on tables to place settings for dinner, these colorful ornamental varieties of squash and pumpkins perk up their surroundings.

Take them one step further: Use them to decorate your snacks and serving dishes, too.

On the rims of platters or in the center of dishes, they’ll turn any food into fun food.

Hardshell gourds have been used since the dawn of man as containers, cooking and eating vessels, plus numerous nonfood purposes.

Softshell gourds are the thinner-skinned, ornamental gourds grown for their bright colors.

Here’s a fun fact: The loofa or luffa is actually a third category of gourd. Also called a vegetable sponge, the exterior is cucumber-shaped. The dried, fibrous interior is used as a sponge.

Find more of our favorite vegetables and recipes in our Vegetables Section.

October 30th is National Candy Corn Day. According to the National Confectioners Association, more than 20 million pounds of candy corn are sold during the Halloween season.

The iconic Halloween confection was created in the late 1880s by George Roniger of the Wunderlee Candy Company, in Philadelphia. The first three-layer candy, it was made laboriously, by hand.

Even with today’s machinery, it takes 4 to 5 days to create each piece of candy corn. Each kernel has 3.57 calories, and they’re all sugar (the ingredients are corn syrup, honey, sugar and food coloring, coated with carnauba wax, a wax from the leaves of a Brazilian palm tree).

The orange, yellow and white colors of the candy corn can actually be found in fresh corn kernels—though the colors are intensified by the candymakers. Some companies create an “Indian corn” version, substituting brown for the yellow base color.

See candy corn being made in the video below.

CANDY CORN TRIVIA
The leading manufacturer of candy corn is Brach’s. Each year, the company sells enough candy corn to circle the earth 4.25 times.

Find more of our favorite candy in our Gourmet Candy Section.

You can buy a ceramic pumpkin tureen for the holiday season.

Or, you can make one out of a real pumpkin, and have pumpkin soup to boot.

 
If you’re making the soup in advance, you can keep the tureen in the fridge or a cool spot. We’d love to save and re-use the tureen, but we’ve never had enough freezer space to see how it freezes. If you do, wash the pumpkin tureen after you’ve served the soup, let it dry, freeze it and please let us know how it goes!

Serve soup from a real pumpkin tureen. Photo by G.M. Vozd | IST.

Decorate Your Tureen
The most breathtaking pumpkin tureen we’ve seen is on the website Phoo-d. The rim is circled with fresh flowers. If you have the time and energy—or simply want to see a beautiful photo—take a look.

Pumpkin Soup Recipes

Dress up a plain white cupcake for
Halloween. Photo courtesy McCormick.com.

Given the focus on fitness at the White House, does the First Family participate in the national cupcake craze?

A White House Garden Cookbook—which includes a collection of recipes and gardening tips from First Families—features a recipe for honey cupcakes enjoyed by the Obamas.

With less sugar and fat—better-for-you honey is substituted for most of the sugar—this recipe, when baked at the White House, uses honey gathered from the Executive Bee Hive at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But if you’re not connected to Charlie Brandt (the White House beekeeper) or Michelle Obama, the honey in your cupboard works just fine.

You can make these cupcakes for Halloween, decorating with candy corn, orange sprinkles or other seasonal decorations.

WHITE HOUSE HONEY CUPCAKES

Cupcake Ingredients

Icing Ingredients

Show of hands: Are these Halloween strawberries cuter than yesterday’s meringue ghost cookies? Not as cute? A tie?

You can send them as a gift, via SharisBerries.com.

Or you can make your own.

You can even plan a strawberry-decorating get-together this weekend. Ask a friend or two if they want to bring their own ingredients and join you. (They’ll also need to bring a baking pan to carry home the decorated berries.)

Ingredients

Who said boo? Photo of chocolate-covered berries courtesy SharisBerries.com.

 
Preparation

1. Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Wash and completely dry the strawberries so the chocolate will adhere properly. You may wish to do this a couple of hours in advance.

2. If you own one or can borrow a chocolate tempering machine, great! If not, simply melt the chocolate in a microwave oven or double boiler. For the microwave, melt at half power for 1 minute in a microwave-safe bowl; stir, then heat at 30-second intervals until completely melted.

4. For orange chocolate, whisk two drops of yellow and one drop of red food coloring into melted white chocolate; stir and continue to add color until you get the right shade of orange.

5. Holding each strawberry by the stem, dip about half of it in chocolate. Give it a quick twist, shake off the excess and point it at the ceiling for a second, bottom side up, to be sure the chocolate adheres.

Decorating The Berries

Melt-in-your-mouth meringue ghosts.
Photo © Michael Klashman |
ButterFlourEggs.com.

We loved this idea from Michael Klashman of ButterFlourEggs.com so much that we signed up for all of his blog feeds.

Meringues are gluten-free, cholesterol-free airy bites. Airy ghosts are perfect Halloween fare.

This recipe makes about 24 ghosts, each 2- to 3-inches: crunchy on the outside and slightly gooey on the inside.

Serve them on a tray, use them as cake or cupcake toppers or make a ghostly sundae.

MERINGUE GHOST COOKIES RECIPE

Ingredients

Preparation

1. PREHEAT the oven to 225°F. (Always use an oven thermometer—you can’t trust the calibration, even on the finest oven.) Prepare two cookie sheets by lining with parchment paper.

2. BEAT the egg whites in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, at medium-high speed just until frothy (about a minute).

3. ADD the salt and cream of tartar. Continue beating and very slowly add the sugar. Continue beating until the whites have become very thick (although not dry) and glossy. The whites should hold their peak when the beater is pulled out of the bowl.

4. ADD the vanilla extract, and continue beating for another fifteen or twenty seconds, just until it has been absorbed into the meringue.

5. TRANSFER the meringue to a large piping bag fitted with a plain, wide tip (for example, Ateco #808). Pipe ghost shapes onto the lined cookie sheets. Using a pair of tweezers, set the dragée “eyes” into the ghosts. This is the painstaking part of recipe, so be patient and have fun. You can use the back of the tweezers or other implement to draw an optional smile. (We used an straightened-out paper clip.)

6. BAKE for fifteen minutes, checking frequently to make sure the meringues do not brown. After fifteen minutes, turn the oven off and leave the meringues inside for 3-4 hours to dry.

Then, WATCH those ghosts disappear!

*Dragée, pronounced drah-ZHAY in French, refers to various types of hard, sugar-based confections. Jordan almonds, for example, are called dragées in France. In the U.S., the term most often refers to a tiny ball of colored sugar, commonly 3-4 millimeters in diameter, used to decorate cookies and cakes. In comparison, the dragées on nonpareils candies are 2 millimeters in diameter. The word derives from the Greek tragêmata, meaning sweets or treats. According to Wikipedia, the dragée was originally a spiced lump of sugar eaten after meals as a digestive.