Candy Corn Cookies

My kids have been interested in candy corn this October. I can't blame them. Candy corn just looks like a fun fall treat! After a bit of internet searching, I concluded that no one makes a natural, organic candy corn. Bummer! But then yesterday I saw a recipe for Candy Corn Sugar cookies at Our Best Bites blog, and my hope was renewed that I could make something similar for my kids.

I didn't know how the natural food coloring would hold up, but it did the job. We had three distinct colors of dough to work with -- white, orange and yellow, and the final product was completely satisfying to my kids!

I followed the sugar cookie recipe from Our Best Bites. My only substitutions were:

• unbleached flour instead of regular flour (cup for cup)
• xylitol instead of sugar (cup for cup)
• natural food coloring instead of artificial food coloring

The xylitol caused my cookies to have a pocked appearance, but my kids didn't seem to notice or care. They just wanted to know how many of these little cookies they were allowed to eat in one sitting!

Halloween Candy

This year I've been working on some special treats for my boys that they will enjoy on Halloween. We will have candy bars and taffy, made without any refined sugar. They've already sampled the goods, but the bulk of it is packed away until Halloween.

For the candy bars, I used the Legally Raw Bar recipe from The Daily Raw Cafe. I had to make a few changes, the biggest being that I used peanuts instead of the mixture of cashews and almonds, since my son is severely allergic to cashews. I used agave instead of honey, and I didn't put any sweetener in the caramel part, since I thought it was already sweet enough with the dates. These bars taste like a cross between a Mounds bar and a Reese's peanut butter cup. They're great! I think if I made them again, though, I would melt grain sweetened chocolate chips mixed with some coconut oil and use that for the chocolate coating. The coating in this recipe is very tasty, but it doesn't harden up even after being in the freezer. If you want your bar to have a solid, non-messy coating, you might want to do the same.

For the taffy, I used a really neat recipe using brown rice syrup found at HeidiLogic. Some friends joined us and we had our very own Taffy Pull. It was so much fun. We made three different flavors - peppermint, almond, and orange. I recommend using a lot of flavoring if you really want to taste it. We did small amounts of each and wished we'd added more. I'd say a tablespoon would be a good amount.

I'm storing the candy bars in the freezer and the taffy in a glass jar on the counter. It will be fun to give the boys some special candy on Halloween!