Bake with Halloween candy: Peanut butter cookies stuffed with Snickers

If you wake up tomorrow with leftover candy or you want to raid your kids' Halloween haul, here's how to bake them into tasty, decadent treats.

Happy Halloween! I've paid almost no attention to Halloween fast approaching (and now here) this year. It's not really my holiday and I've been busy so Oct. 31 just crept up on me. I don't get many kids trick or treating in my neighborhood so I didn't even really stock up on candy this year. In prior years, I would buy a few bags and end up using them to bake with.

Typical Halloween candy has no appeal for me but I don't mind if they're baked in something. It's easy to use up Halloween candy. Chocolate bars can be easy add-ins to brownies and some cookies. If you have peanut butter cups, cut them up and stick them on top of peanut butter cookies. Almond Joys and Mounds can be cut up and added to Magic Cookie bar recipes. Sugar cookie dough wraps easily around Rolos. Snickers, Milky Ways, 3 Musketeers and the like are easily folded into brownie batters and/or sprinkled on top during the last few minutes of baking. Get creative and bake away.

Snickers-stuffed peanut butter cookies

The only issue with making these as cookie cups is they are a bit fragile so getting them out of the muffin tins was a little problematic. If you're careful, they won't necessarily break apart but they might get a little misshapen coming out of the tins. You can also forgo baking them in the mini muffin tins and instead bake "straight" as cookies. I tried that and that also worked pretty well. Just make sure the peanut butter cookie dough covers the Snickers completely.

1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup peanut butter
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
Pinch of salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 extra-large egg (or 2 medium eggs)
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
Extra sugar for rolling
Bite-sized Snickers, cut in half (as many as you have dough for)

1. Beat together the butter, peanut butter, and vanilla extract. Mix in both sugars, salt, and baking powder.

2. Beat in the egg. Gradually mix in the flour, half at a time. Take a tablespoon of dough and wrap around a Snickers piece. Freeze or refrigerate dough balls until firm.

3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Roll the balls in the sugar. Place evenly apart on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

4. Bake for 12-13 minutes.

5. Let cookies cool on the cookie sheet after taking them out for about 8 minutes before removing them with a spatula. Cool completely before storing.

For more ideas on how to bake candy into treats, see Halloween 2014 – Get the candy ready