Food Friday- Halloween Popcorn Crunch Bark

 I know it isn't Halloween yet, but around my house I want to celebrate Halloween all year long, so if we are this close to Halloween, I go into full Halloween mode.  I saw a few different Halloween snack ideas I wanted to try and I noticed that lots of them had similar ingredients. I wanted to try each of them and then got a wild idea to MIX all three of them. The end result was yummy, but I would still like to try them separately some time. Beware this might be sugar overload. We have enjoyed the treat and experiment. Here are the three recipes I pulled my mix from:

 

Halloween Popcorn

 

Candy Corn Cookie Crunch

 

Halloween Candy Bark

This should also explain why I have this snack title such a long name. If you look at the full recipes for each of these three treats, you will see that I didn't use Butterfingers and Oreos. For starters, I didn't have any, and secondly, I thought we probably had enough chocolate and flavorings going on.

 

Here are the supplies I DID use (remember, I said yummy not healthy. haha):

-Wax paper

-Cookie sheet

-Melt-able chocolate

-Almond Bark

-Candy Corn

-Almonds (these were the only nuts I had and they were smokehouse flavored, which was a weird flavor to add. I would not recommend smokehouse almonds, but definitely regular almonds or peanuts would be great)

-Toffee Bites

-Reese's chips or actual Reese's pieces (we were sort of cleaning out the cupboard of random supplies. i.e. VALENTINE'S Reese's pieces. haha)

-Pretzels (I would recommend the sticks. Ours were a little stale so I had to just break up the pretzel twists we had that weren't stale. The pretzels had a much needed and yummy crunch to the snack that I wouldn't omit.)

-Popcorn

-Peanut M&Ms (we used Halloween colored ones for more fun)

-Halloween sprinkles

 

 We got all our toppings chopped that needed chopping: pretzels, some M&Ms. In retrospect you wouldn't have to chop anything as long as you used the stick pretzels. We over chopped some of our items unnecessarily.

 We heated enough chocolate  to make a thin layer along the wax papered cookie sheet. Then you have to act real fast as you spread all the ingredients except the popcorn, almond bark, and Halloween sprinkles because you want all of it to stick to the chocolate before it hardens.

 Here is the chocolate bark of goodness. In retrospect I should have put this pan into the fridge or freezer to cool all the way so the chocolate was all the way hardened. It would have made for a less soupy looking finished product, and again, I over chopped some items.

 Pop the popcorn while the assistants lick the chocolate bowl. :) Again, in retrospect I should have let the popcorn cool all the way so that I could have added cooled off popcorn to cooled chocolate so there would be no messy chocolate melting happening.  It would have made it much cuter in the end too.

 Break the bark and popcorn into chunks and drizzle the melted almond bark over the whole mixture, mixing the popcorn and chocolate bark as you pour the almond bark on.

 While the almond bark is still warm, sprinkle the Halloween sprinkles.

 I then spread it all back onto wax paper and put it in the freezer to harden.

Then we ate our delicious treats. Again, the only mistake besides the smokehouse pretzels was not letting the different items cool before mixing it together. It tasted yummy regardless.