Photo: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
Ferrero Rochers are too pretty for Halloween—too fancy, too golden, too...nice. Fortunately, there are two easy ways to transform them into being perfect for last-minute Halloween party or spooky evening in with the kids.
Make them into eyeballs
A plate of disembodied eyeballs make for an exceptionally unsettling sweet. The Ferrero is already spherical, which is usually the hard part of making eye-shaped desserts in the first place. All you need is a little bit of melted white chocolate and some chocolate chips to make the white and the pupil.
Start by taking the gold foil off of the candies. You can discard those, but save the brown paper cup if you can. Those will be useful after you’ve finished decorating them to hold them in place on a dish; they also give the slight impression of eyelids if you squint hard enough. Melt down a couple ounces of white chocolate in a small bowl, and have semi-sweet morsels at the ready. If you only have dark chocolate bars, melt down a second small bowl of the dark chocolate. I usually employ the help of my microwave for melting chocolate—it’s quick and you only need to stir every 10 or 20 seconds while heating to make sure it doesn’t burn. It should make a puddle deep enough where you can dip the candy in and coat most of the front.
Dip each Ferrero into the white chocolate and tilt it to cover the front half of the ball. Put the eyeballs on a wire cooling rack, white side up, to dry. The wire rack will prevent the eyeballs from rolling around and bumping into each other, but if you don’t have one of those, use the brown paper cups you saved, or rest them on a clean tea towel to keep them from sliding. Put them into the fridge or freezer for five to ten minutes to harden the chocolate.
If you’re using chocolate morsels to make the pupils, take the pointed tip off with a paring knife to help it lay flatter. Take your eyeballs out of the fridge after five minutes, when the chocolate is set but still soft, then press a morsel into the center of the white chocolate. If you don’t have morsels and you melted down some dark chocolate, you’re simply dipping them again, but not as deeply. Hold each candy, white chocolate side down, and dunk it into the dark chocolate as centered as possible. Dip less than you think—the pupil should be small, about a third of the size of the white. Any bigger and they’ll look like they’re on acid. Place them on the cooling rack again and chill in the fridge for another five minutes to set the chocolate. Then they’re ready to serve.
Or make spiders with pretzel legs
A plate of chocolate hazelnut arachnids can be all yours with a little help from mini pretzels. Although pretzel sticks can work here, I find they make the candy look less like spiders and more like a diagram of static electricity, so do your best to find the minis. Chocolate covered pretzels work great here if you want an uninterrupted chocolate coating. My market was out of them, so I went with the original pretzel look.
Unwrap the Ferrero Rocher candies and put them in the freezer. (Starting out with cold candy will help later when you want the legs to stick on.) Melt down a couple ounces of milk or dark chocolate. This will be the “glue” for the pretzel legs, so you won’t need much. It’s better to use low-quality chocolate morsels or melted chocolate that has cooled to a thick consistency, as it’s easier to work with. Break the mini pretzels into as many little arches as you’ll need. They don’t need to be perfectly identical because, honestly, that’s hard to do, and also the variety makes them look like they’re in motion. If you’re thinking, “Eight legs is too many to fit on this Ferrero,” just do six and call it a beetle.
Remove the Ferreros from the freezer. Take a pretzel leg and dip one end into the melted chocolate. Stick the leg onto the Ferrero Rocher body. The cold candy and the semi-cool chocolate “glue” should seize up quickly once they meet. Repeat with all of the legs. Set the spiders in the fridge or freezer for a few minutes to set the chocolate firmly before serving. Lay out your spiders and eyeballs on a platter, and get to creeping people out.
