Healthy Halloween Candy Pumpkin Cookies and What To Do With All That Candy!

Hi, Friends,

A quick question to moms:

What’s the SCARIEST thing about Halloween? (After of course keeping our kids safe.)

…If you’re a mom, then you’re probably thinking what I’m thinking… THE CANDY OVERLOAD! The terrible-horrible sugar rush!

Oh, well… Don’t we just wish that they’d be giving away some broccoli instead of the candy to our little trick-or-treaters? …Or at least some fruit… But that ain’t be happening any time soon! 🙂 Not in our world, right?

And since we can’t Fly and we can’t Flee… (i.e. skip the Trick-Or-Treating altogether, because our kids won’t forgive us for that, right?)

I guess we just need to Flow… Or come out with our own plan of counteractions…

But let’s first take a look at what we got… Because to begin with not all candies are created equal…

…Here’s my list of “the GOOD”, “the BAD” and “the UGLY” Halloween Candies:

• The GOOD (as good as the sugary treats get, of course): I’ll consider it a good candy if that candy is ALL-NATURAL. The examples are the Hershey/Godiva (not sure that you’ll be getting those, but anyway), Dove and other pure chocolate bars/kisses/droplets, etc; the chocolate-covered dry fruit or nuts; the all-fruit “Shoe-Leather” and, in general, anything that has the “all-natural” or “organic” label on it (and I was actually amazed to find a good amount of those in my sons’ Trick-Or-Treating bags!)
• The BAD: worse than the Good ones, but not TOO bad to be considered the Ugly. Usually in this pile I’ll put the candies that mostly consist of something undoubtably natural (like chocolate, nuts, dry fruit, etc), and has some processed ingredients in it, too. The examples are the “Snickers”, “Twix”, “Bounty” and other chocolate-covered bars; the lollipops, the M&Ms, etc.
• The UGLY: all that stuff that just screams “I’m ARTIFICIAL!”: everything made purely out of food coloring, some sort of artificial acid, high-fructose corn syrup, etc. The perfect examples of those are the “Sour Warms”, the sugar-free gum (why would you ever give that to a kid?!), etc.

…And what I usually do with EACH kind:

• The Good: there isn’t usually that much of it, but that’s the pile that I’ll let my kids go through first. And since I still won’t let them eat ALL that candy at once, whatever is left after a few days of reasonable snacking on it becomes either an ingredient for my next healthy dessert or goes in the freezer.
• The Bad: …occasionally you have to let your kids have a little bit of a blast… So if they REALLY want something from that pile – they can have it!
• The Ugly… Sorry, guys. Maybe I’ll seem wasteful here… But this pile goes straight in the garbage. Because not only I won’t let my kids fill up on those. I don’t want to subject other kids to that stuff either. And so I am not going to donate/share/etc. it. I may sound harsh here, but the “Ugly” candy just isn’t anything edible…

…So here’s one of the healthy (OK, healthy-isn, because there is SOME sugar in it) desserts that I just made with some of the “Good” Halloween candies:

The Healthy Halloween Candy Pumpkin Cookies!

…And if it wasn’t for SOME of that sugary candy that I chopped and mixed in the cookie dough, these cookies could be rightfully considered super-healthy!…I’ll save the praising of my most favorite healthy vegetable PUMPKIN for another post. (Since this one seems to be getting a little bit heavy on the writing and I know that it is time to finally get down to business. Or, in other words, to the recipe…)But the beautiful, colorful, super-healthy, naturally sweet and moist pumpkin puree truly makes wonders for these cookies! With it I didn’t need to use much fat to make my cookies moist…The healthy vitamins that the pumpkin contains helped neutralize the sugary candy mixed into the dough making these cookies… well… doubtlessly healthy-isn. 🙂And because I didn’t use much fat to make these golden little wonders, they came out low in calories!That’s how I’ll be eating my Halloween Candy for… breakfast! 🙂…And I won’t feel bad about it at all! Even if I’ll end up devouring more than a few of these Super-Healthy-ish Cookies! 🙂What do you usually do about the Terrible-Horrible Candy Overload? 🙂

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Healthy Post-Halloween Soft Pumpkin Cookies

Even though there is some leftover Halloween Candy in these Soft Pumpkin Cookies, they are still healthy enough to eat for breakfast! Enjoy more than a few without feeling guilty about it!

Course Cookies

Cuisine American

Prep Time 10 minutes

Cook Time 15 minutes

Total Time 25 minutes

Servings 36 cookies

Author Liza

Ingredients

• 2 cups pure pumpkin puree
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup honey
• 3 oz coconut or avocado oil
• 1 egg
• 1 egg white
• 1 tbsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp pumpkin spice
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 pinch salt
• 1/3 cup Halloween chopped candy*

Instructions

1. In a large bowl whisk the egg and the egg white until the yolk and the whites are incorporated. Add the oil, honey, pumpkin and vanilla extract. Mix well, until the ingredients are incorporated.
2. In another bowl whisk the flour with the salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and pumpkin spice.
3. Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and mix until everything is incorporated.
4. Chop some leftover Halloween Candy and add it to the dough. Stir the dough.
5. Place about two tablespoons of the dough for each cookie on a cookie sheet leaving at least 1 inch of space between each cookie.
6. Bake the cookies for about 15 minutes (it depends on your oven, but you can tell that the cookies are done when their tops have cracked slightly and the toothpick inserted in the middle of a cookie comes out clean.)
7. Cool the cookies before storing them. Enjoy!

Recipe Notes

*I used the types of candy that you can actually chop, such as various chocolate bars and fruit snacks. Obviously it'd rather impossible to chop up the lollipops... 🙂