Alter your child’s usual snacks with Halloween-themed snacks he can make to celebrate the holiday. Allow your child to find his favorite or experiment with different snacks every day leading up to Halloween. Plan a variety of Halloween-themed snacks for a group of children so each child can find his favorite.
Cupcakes
Bake your child’s favorite flavor of cupcakes and give her a variety of different colored frosting and candy toppings. She can decorate the cupcake to look like a jack-o’-lantern with orange frosting and a black tube of icing or black candies. Make a spider web using black frosting and top it off with candy spiders. Other Halloween candy toppings can include candy corn, skeletons, ghosts, gummy worms or other Halloween-themed candies.
Cookies or Bread
Even toddlers can help make Halloween cookies by using ghost, pumpkin, skeleton or other Halloween-shaped cookie cutters. Let your child cut cookie shapes out of his favorite cookie dough or simply draw spooky pictures on any shape of sugar cookies. An older child might shape the cookies himself, the way he might shape toy dough or clay. Alternatively, let your child make Halloween-shaped bread using a basic bread dough and cookie cutters or let him shape it himself. Let him make a scary face or shape in the dough if he likes raisin bread or candy cookies. He can also alter sandwiches or fresh slices of fruit by shaping them with Halloween cookie cutters.
Gelatin or Pudding
Gelatin treats are fairly easy to make and mold. Help your child cut the gelatin into Halloween shapes using cookie cutters after the mixture has started to solidify. Make it more interesting by adding little goodies, such as cherries or sliced fruit. Push the extras into the gelatin before it sets to create a jack-o-lantern face, scary monster or whatever ghoul the child wants to create.
Arrange pudding, particularly chocolate pudding, to look like a spooky graveyard. Let your child make an entire dish or individual serving by filling a container halfway with chocolate pudding. Crumble chocolate cookies over the top of the pudding to look like fresh dirt or mud. Add creepy, crawly things, such as gummy worms or candy spiders. Dip large marshmallows in chocolate sprinkles or brown coconut shavings and stick them in the “ground” to look like gravestones.
Pumpkin Seeds
Remove the top of a pumpkin and assist your child in gutting the pumpkin. Separate the pumpkin seeds from the pumpkin flesh. Let her arrange the pumpkin seeds on a cookie sheet in her favorite Halloween shape and bake them to snack on later. Use the pumpkin flesh to make pumpkin bread or pumpkin-flavored cupcakes in whatever shape she desires.
