Whatever way you are celebrating Halloween this year, one thing is for certain: kids want their treats! Whether you’re trick or treating, or making new traditions at home, you can feel good about feeding your kids fresh fruits & vegetables. We have some great, spooky treats that will please the eyes and the tummies of ‘kids’ of all ages!
Halloween is fast approaching and you’re looking for something festive, but healthy, to feed to your crew. Look no further – we have fresh, tasty and healthy treats in store for you in the form of snacking boards. Snacking boards are very trendy right now and the best thing about them? They are very customizable for any occasion, EVEN the spookiest day of the year: HALLOWEEN!
A little bit of this and a little bit of that means that everyone can have something they like. The beauty of snacking boards encourages taking multiple items to create a variety of choices, it’s a great opportunity for kids to try something they might not have tried before! (Plus, dressing it up as a Halloween themed board might encourage even the pickiest of the crew to try something new.)
Our large snacking board features these super cute Mini Pepper Mummies that are incredibly easy to make. All you need to make this recipe is: Aurora Bites Mini Sweet Peppers, a brick of cream cheese, cooked bacon, shredded cheese, a can of crescent roll dough, and some candy eyeballs. (Candy eyeballs can be found at stores that sell cake decorating supplies.)
First, you’re going to slice the Mini Sweet Peppers in half and clean the seeds out. Then, in a medium-sized bowl, mix together the cream cheese (make sure that it’s room temperature so that it’s easy to mix), bacon, and shredded cheese. Fill each mini pepper with the filling, but don’t fill it up too much because you’re going to put their mummy wraps on and you don’t want the filling oozing out when they cook in the oven. Once each one is full, set them aside.
Next, open the can of the crescent roll dough and lay it out on parchment paper so it doesn’t stick to the countertop. Using a sharp knife or a pizza cutter, cut the dough into long, thin strips – about a quarter-inch wide. You might be thinking about precutting these strips before filling the peppers, but we don’t recommend this. The dough dries out very quickly and will make it harder to wrap the mummies because the dough will not be sticky enough.
You’re going to use 2 strips for each mummy: start with one at the top and wrap it one way around the pepper, then with the next strip, start at the bottom and wrap the opposite way. Don’t forget to leave room for the eyes! But don’t put them on just yet – they will melt in the oven.
Place each Mini Sweet Pepper Mummy on a baking tray. If you’re using a non-stick baking tray, you won’t need parchment paper or cooking spray, but if things tend to stick to your baking tray, we recommend you use either to make sure that your mummies transfer from the tray to the snacking board easily.
After you take the mummies out of the oven, be sure to let them cool before inserting the eyes. You don’t need anything to make them stick, you just need to push them gently in between the strips of dough on top of the filling so that they’re peeking out.
Now comes the fun part!
Putting together the snacking board is super easy, but does requires a little preparation. Gather up little Halloween decorations such as eyeballs, spiders, skeletons – whatever you think your ‘snackers’ will like.
Arrange the Mini Pepper Mummies on the board first so that you can see what room is left to fill with other goodies. On our board, we used little ghost and Jack O’Lantern cookie cutters to cut out slices of cheese. We also used a larger cookie cutter of a ghost to hold some boo-berries – oops, we mean blueberries – in place so they don’t roll around and a larger pumpkin cookie cutter to hold our delicious Oriana Orange Grape Tomatoes.
We also put a bowl of guacamole and some blue tortilla chips; bats made from blue tortilla chips and Medjool date rolls; slices of dry salami; sliced kiwi fruit; blackberries; strips of our yellow and orange Sweet Bell Peppers; our Bumbles® Yellow Grape Tomatoes; and the newest addition to our snacking line Uno Bites™ Nano Cucumbers!
With the large snacking tray finished, why stop now when you’re on a roll? Our second snacking tray features our Spooky Black Bean Dip. This dip is made using our Stingrays Multi-colored Hot Peppers, so it has a little kick to it. To cool it down, it has a spider web motif on the top made with a protein-packed Greek yogurt. This one is also very easy to prepare. All the ingredients go into the blender and in a few short minutes, you have a tasty, healthy dip.
For the spider web motif, using a squirt bottle is the easiest way to control the flow of the Greek yogurt, but if you don’t have a squirt bottle, have no fear, a plastic baggy will work in a pinch. Put the Greek yogurt into the bottle or the baggy (if you’re going to use a baggy, push all the yogurt into one corner and cut the tip to make a small hole you can squeeze it out of) and start with one large outside circle, then a smaller inside circle and finally the lines that connect the spider web to the bowl.
To assemble this tray, there’s a little more prep. We took some kiwi fruit and sliced the skin all the way around, about a quarter of the way down, and peeled three-quarters of the rest of it off. Then you stick some pretzel bits in at the sides just underneath where the skin stops, add some eyeballs, and used black icing gel for the mouth. Voila! Frankenstein’s monster heads.
We made some broomsticks using pretzels for the handles and cubes of white cheddar for the brushes. Then we put more ghost and pumpkin cheese cut outs; blue tortilla chips; Oriana Orange Grape Tomatoes and Bumbles® Yellow Grape Tomatoes; Aurora Bites Mini Sweet Peppers with fun candy eyeballs; and finally, we made some aliens using our Uno Bites™ Nano Cucumbers and Poco Bites® Cocktail Cucumbers.
These snacking boards were so much fun to make and even more fun to eat! We hope that you and your family have a very safe and fun Halloween this year.
To view, download or print more recipes: Get Cooking!
