Halloween Peanut Butter Cup Pumpkin Rocky Road!

Rocky Road is one of my favourite things to make! It doesn't require you to turn on your mixer and wake a sleeping baby, or try and track down where the heck your whisk attachment has gone to (seriously whisk...where are you? my guess is lost in the move) and it can certainly be whipped up in one of the baby's shorter naps...and if you're lucky enough to live in a hot country it's good for those days when you can't bear to turn the oven on!  It is also SO versatile! It was one of the very first things I ever baked, using a recipe from one of those little random chocolate recipe books you get as a stocking filler! Go ahead and laugh at my embarrassing blog post back in 2009 where it made its debut. Since then I have jazzed it up using all of my favourite treats - Snickers and Oreo, Reese's peanut butter, crazy amounts of coconut and festive peppermint ones plus seasonal mini egg easter ones too!

So I thought it was about time that my peanut butter rocky road got made over into a Halloween edition! because I found a bag of reese's peanut butter pumpkins in Tesco and I knew I had to use them in my kitchen! Sadly when I opened them up they didn't look like pumpkins at all! just an oval sized peanut butter cup! so I pimped them jack-o-lantern style with a little bit of orange coloured white chocolate, green sanding sugar and chocolate sprinkles and mini chocolate chips!

I'm not exactly an artist, but hopefully there's no denying now that those are pumpkins!

I even added in peanut butter m&m's too to truly amp up the peanut butter goodness involved! and with some chopped peanut butter cups making up the bulk of the add ins you just can't go wrong! Throw some marshmallows, chopped nice and chunky, and rice krispies into the mix and you've got one delicious Halloween treat!

Not a trick in sight!

Peanut Butter Cup Pumpkin Rocky Road:

Serves 9

Adapted from Cupcake Crazy Gem

400g milk chocolate

100g dark chocolate

2 tsp vegetable oil

35g rice krispies

150g marshmallows

75g peanut butter m&m's

240g peanut butter cups (approx. 16)

9 peanut butter pumpkins

60g white chocolate, I used milky bar

1/2 tsp orange food colouring

green sanding sugar

18 chocolate sprinkles

9 mini chocolate chips

Line an 8x8 dish with parchment paper.
Melt your milk and dark chocolate in a large bowl together over a pan of boiling water.  Once melted, remove from the heat and stir in the vegetable oil.  Leave to cool.

Chop your marshmallows in half, and your peanut butter cups into quarters.  Measure out your rice krispies and peanut butter m&m's.  Check that your chocolate is completely cool - you should leave it for at least 10 minutes (if it's still warm, when you add in your chocolates they will melt so the cooling process is important!)  Once it's cool, stir in all the mix ins.  Spread evenly into your baking pan.  I like to reserve back a bit of the chocolate in the bottom of the mixing bowl to use right at the end to smooth out the surface of the rocky road.

Melt your white chocolate in a small bowl in the microwave in 20 second bursts - watch it because white chocolate burns easily.  I used milky bar because the lower quality white chocolate melts far easier - don't go buying any fancy stuff for this.  Once melted stir in the orange food colouring.  Put into a piping bag and snip a tiny tip off the end.

Take 9 pumpkins, and pipe a thin edge all the way round with the orange chocolate.  Do zig zag lines in the middle of each pumpkin and at the end go back with your piping bag tip to help smooth out the chocolate until the pumpkin surface is completely covered.  Sprinkle green sanding sugar on the stem, and use 2 chocolate sprinkles for the eyes.  Place a mini chocolate chip for the nose.

Once all your pumpkins are complete, place them on top of the rocky road, pushing down slightly so they set into the chocolate.

Refrigerate for 2 hours until set, or overnight.

Eat and enjoy!

Happy Halloween! Snickers & Oreo Rocky Road

It's Halloween!! and thank goodness for the blogosphere getting all festive because it certainly doesn't feel like Halloween around these parts! Our Halloween party we were meant to be going to got cancelled, we couldn't go to the pumpkin patch to pick our pumpkin due to insufficient funds! and although we have our Halloween candy ready I'm betting that we won't get a single trick or treater.  It's definitely at times like these I wish I lived in America - everything is more fun over there! 

but...I did get very excited when I discovered these Halloween Oreos in Tesco (our local supermarket) a few weeks ago.  It is the very first time I have ever seen them in the U.K, we're catching on slowly so it seems.  I'm crossing my fingers that they'll surprise me with Mint Oreos any day too but I'm not sure that will ever happen! I also got excited when I saw these orange Silver Spoon buttons, like candy melts.  So I snapped both of these up in the hopes of making a yummy Halloween treat.

However, despite all this thinking and planning weeks ago...Halloween definitely snuck up on me! and right now I am writing one of my first essays for my course (it is due on Wednesday) so last night I knew whatever I made needed to be quick so I settled on my favourite Snickers Rocky Road recipe.

Of course I decided the usual pink and white marshmallows wouldn't do, and in true Halloween spirit they would have to be orange.  In England you can't buy orange marshmallows so that meant one thing - I would need to whip some up! So you can see this quick treat turned out being rather time consuming in the end....anything to get out of writing an essay! 

I followed Smitten Kitchens rather excellent tutorial about how to make marshmallows and I just threw in some orange food colour right before I poured them in to the pan.

I chopped up my Snickers, got a cup full of rice krispies, 2 mini bags of Oreos and a handful of orange buttons.  I chopped up the marshmallows and then I was ready to start melting some chocolate and mixing the whole lot together.

I melted another handful of the orange buttons and drizzled them over the top before refrigerating for around an hour.

and there you have it, the perfect no bake treat to bring some Halloween spirit to your neighbourhood! Give it a try! If you buy store bought marshmallows this whole treat can be whipped up in less than 10 minutes and then it's just a painful hour in the fridge while you wait for it to set! 

Snickers & Oreo Rocky Road:

Makes 16 bars

50g mini Halloween Oreos

25g orange chocolate buttons

230g Snickers (4 standard size bars)

150g marshmallows

35g Rice Krispies

450g Your preferred choice of eating chocolate (I used Dairy Milk)

2 tsp vegetable oil

For decoration:

60g orange chocolate buttons

Break the Oreos and chocolate buttons in half.  Chop Snickers bars into bite sized pieces.  Chop up marshmallows.  Measure out Rice Krispies and set everything aside.

Melt the eating chocolate and oil together in a glass bowl set above a pan of boiling water.  

Once it is completely melted, set aside to cool for 10 minutes.  Turn flame down to low and heat the pan of water gently.

Add all the other ingredients into the bowl of chocolate and mix together.

Transfer into a pre greased baking pan.

Put the 60g orange chocolate buttons into a bowl and return to the pan of water that should still be being heated, but not boiling.  Melt buttons and transfer to a piping bag.  Drizzle over the Rocky Road,

Refrigerate for one hour or until firm, cut and serve and enjoy.