Tarantula Treats

Cooking is inherently creative.

Standing alone, butter, flour, and bittersweet chocolate chips are nothing to get excited about.  No one clamors for a cup of fresh flour or a few handfuls of unsweetened chocolate.  But combine these three ingredients with sugar and an egg, and suddenly, you have chocolate chip cookies.  After vanilla extract and salt, you can really get creative.  Add toffee chips.  Or white chocolate chips.  Or maybe crushed Girl Scout cookies.

Halloween offers the opportunity to get even more creative in the kitchen.  On any other day, the challenge is to make good food look good.  And with the right ingredients and care, the task is not so hard.  But on Halloween, the challenge is to make good food look frightening.

On ordinary days, ingredients stand on their own.  Butter is used as butter.  Flour is used as flour.  But on Halloween, almond slices are not just nuts, they’re fingernails.  Strawberry jam isn’t a condiment, it’s a bloody adhesive.  Candy corns double as spider teeth, and pretzel sticks act as arachnid legs.

And that’s just what we did.  We turned sugar cookies into fingers with bloody nails.  And we turned rice-krispie treats into threatening spiders.  For Halloween, we made good food look frightening.  We also transformed two legal eagles into one prehistoric couple.

Tarantula Treats

Recipe adapted from RiceKrispies.com

PREP TIME: 25 minutes, plus 10 minutes for cooling
COOK TIME: 10 minutes
YIELD: About 15 spooky spiders

WHAT TO GRAB:
3 tablespoons butter
1 10-ounce package regular marshmallows
1 box of Cocoa Krispies
Pretzel sticks
Black Icing
Candy Corns

HOW YOU DO IT:

1.  In a large saucepan, melt the butter over medium-low heat.  Add the marshmallows and stir until completely melted.  Remove from the heat, and stir in the cocao krispies until the cereal is completely coated.  Allow the mixture to cool for about 10 minutes.

2.  Using buttered hands, shape the cereal into an equal number of large and small spheres.  For each spider, join the small sphere to the large sphere.  Break four pretzel sticks in half, and insert four halves into each side of the large sphere to make arachnid legs.  Break off the white part of the candy corns and insert the white triangles into the small sphere to make tarantula fangs.  Pipe black icing on top of the small sphere for scary spider eyes.  Serve if you dare!