Here's An Almost-Healthy Way To Use Up That Leftover Halloween Candy

What's the best part of Halloween — the candy or the dressing up? Every kid on your block would probably answer with an outstretched bucket in one hand and a threatening rotten egg in the other. As such, you likely buy more candy to hand out than you need to avoid angering the little demons, ghosts, and witches.

But as November stretches on, that pile of unused candy becomes daunting. There's nothing wrong with a binge or two in moderation, but there are more creative ways to use up the pile. One of the better methods that helps avoid the season's traditional binging-of-the-chocolate is to mix it up into trail mix.

What's brilliant about this method is you can make it as easy or involved as you want. You could mix any given M&M flavor with some nuts and call it a day, for example, or you could get out your cauldron and throw a dozen different candies and ingredients together. There's genuinely no wrong combination.

The list of candies available during this time of year is daunting, to say the least. To stay focused, let's consider the top three best-selling Halloween candies of 2022 (via Instacart), starting with the number one: Reese's peanut butter cups. There's plenty of chocolate and nuttiness in Reese's, so you want to add more flavor layers. Dried fruits are perfect for this, but that leaves you with only soft foods. To complete this trail mix, add some crunchy bits. Small pretzels in all their forms are great, or you could mix in some traditional Chex Mix.

The numbers two and three, peanut and regular M&Ms, are already a mainstay of trail mixes so let's get weird with them. Once you've put together a pretty standard trail mix (M&Ms, some fruit and nuts, maybe some other crunchy bits), go a step further and add that mix to some cookie dough for trail mix cookies. Nobody said trail mix had to be health-focused all the time.