One of my favorite candies is one you can make yourself. Commonly called Puppy Chow, this concoction – which requires little baking or time – can also be found at Christmas time with names such as Reindeer Food or Kibble. This sweet treat is a Midwest standard at church bazaars, elementary school craft shows and homemade Halloween parties, so you know it’s gotta be good.

Let me tell you from the start that Puppy Chow is some weird-looking stuff. There’s a reason it’s named after pet food. The finished snack is muddy brown with a white chalky-looking coating. But while this treat may not look very appetizing, once you get over its challenging appearance you won’t be able to stop “chowing down.” Kids love it, and can make it themselves with a little help from an adult. Even as kitchen-challenged as I am, I can whip up a batch in a pinch.

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Oh, Halloween! For a Candy Addict, it truly is the most wonderful night of the year.

As a kid, I would spend hours on the streets of my neighborhood, trekking from door to door to door, opening my pillowcase and shouting, “Trick or Treat!” in my neighbor’s faces in the hopes of collecting lovely chocolates and sweets. My sister and I had Trick-or-Treating down to a science: we’d mapped out routes, planned time schedules, and figured out ways to crisscross certain streets in order to maximize our candy-haul potential. At the end of the night, we’d usually end up with about 150 fun-size bars (and a few full-size bars, because believe me, we knew exactly who gave them out and where to find them).

Our post-Trick-or-Treating ritual was always the same; we’d dump our pillowcases on to the living room rug and start categorizing our candy into separate piles. Not only did this make it easier for us to decide which bars we wanted to trade (“I’ll give you 4 Kit-Kats for 4 Baby Ruths“), but it also made it easier to spot the most important candy bar in the pillowcase: the all important Halloween Gem.

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We all have trick-or-treaters we really don’t want to give candy to. You know the ones – thug teenagers who have no business being out trick-or-treating, parents asking for candy for their third child who happens to be 2 weeks old (“Yes, she eats breast milk, formula, and a few Snickers here and there”), and repeat customers who come back because they know you give out the good stuff. So what to do with these ne’er-do-wells? Give them some candy that sucks, of course! And I found the perfect candidate – crunchy tarantulas.

I found crunchy tarantulas at the same time I got the gummy brains from Oriental Trading. I really truly thought they would be good – marshmallow, gummy, and hard candy bits? What could be better? Well, for one, eating a bar of soap. Or possibly chemically treated wood pellets. Seriously. Nasty. Stuff.

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There are many food associations for the month of October and Halloween. But personally, I can think of no other recipe that rings as true to this autumnal month than baked apples.

Apples themselves are an odd entity in the candy world, mainly lending themselves to either a sour apple flavoring or through the ever-popular candy apple. Aside from those formats, one rarely finds apple anywhere in the candy world.

So why am I talking about fruit when it is the antithesis of the holiest candy holiday of the year? Because you can’t just serve your guests candy at your Halloween party! Well… you could, but you shouldn’t. That is why instead of my typical candy bar for the month, I thought up a recipe that combines my favorite things about apples and gave them a candy makeover.

In the end, I decided I would combine my favorite elements to create a hybrid between a baked apple and a candy apple. The result is October’s candy recipe for what I call the Grand Apple, the perfect treat to serve any guest, whether they be a sugar-loving child or a nutrition-stubborn parent.

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When I went to the Swedish Fish Party a few weeks back, I salvaged the evening by buying a few varieties of Halloween candy I hadn’t tried before. Unfortunately, it was so overpriced I didn’t buy very much, and what I did buy got devoured on the subway on the way home. So, I didn’t get a chance to review any of it. Last week, we were ordering stuff from Oriental Trading for Halloween gift bags when I saw the very gummy brains I had bought at Dylan’s Candy Bar and decided this was my chance to give them a proper review!

The brains are multicolored with blues, oranges, whites and pinks on peach backgrounds. They’re not quite globular, but instead are somewhat squashed. The brainy ridges are the only thing that make these actually resemble brains; luckily, their flavor redeems them.

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