Healthy Halloween Trail Mix Recipe

Halloween trail mix is a deliciously healthy way to celebrate Halloween, a holiday notorious for fattening sweets and cavity inducing candy. Trail mix by itself can turn many children and adults off just by name, but a cool name plus a twist on the old trail mix favorites will lead to a Halloween trail mix that your guests cannot resist.

If you are planning to create some trail mix for your Halloween party or for home consumption, a large bowl will work to contain your Halloween trail mix. A large orange or green one will work if you cannot find a themed one, but most discount stores start carrying Halloween serving bowls in early September. If you are planning to give the Halloween trail mix to party guests as individual treats, if you would like to cut down on consumption (particularly useful at a children's Halloween party) or if you are planning to give this out to trick-or-treaters, plastic baggies work well. You can even find Halloween themed ones at larger stores or Halloween specific stores. Note that if you are giving these out to trick-or-treaters, be aware that many parents do not like for children to receive unsealed treats from people they may not know very well, so this may work best if you know that the trick-or-treaters likely to darken your doorstep are close family friends.

Next, you'll need to come up with a Halloween based theme for your Halloween trail mix. Witches' Mix or Monster Gruel come to mind as names, but you can name it just about anything except "Halloween trail mix," which has all of the excitement of, well, trail mix, and is unlikely to go over as well. A recent study from Cornell have shown that children are quite a lot more likely to eat healthy foods with "cool" names than foods with the more ordinary names. Make use of this finding as you are serving your Halloween trail mix.

For the base of your Halloween trail mix, Chex mix, pretzels and peanuts are good options, though always make sure that people who are going to consume this delicious Halloween trail mix are aware of the nut content and that there will be no party participants who are extremely allergic to peanuts. If there are, simply leave this ingredient out of the Halloween trail mix. Next, determine how healthy you would like your trail mix to be. In order to keep with a truly Halloween theme, you can mix shaped marshmallows or candy corn into the Halloween trail mix. This obviously introduces more fattening foods, but these can be added to your specifications.

Marshmallows are considerably less cavity inducing than chocolate, but dark chocolate contains antioxidants that can help avoid illnesses. If you really like the idea of keeping dark chocolate in the Halloween trail mix, think about adding dark chocolate M&Ms, which come in Halloween colors and contain those great antioxidants. Another way to introduce a bit of sweetness into the Halloween trail mix without going overboard is to dip pretzels in melted white chocolate colored (using food coloring) green or orange. Although this takes quite a bit more work, it will add to the overall appearance and taste of your Halloween trail mix.

Overall, have fun making the Halloween trail mix. There are no trail mix rules. Adding sunflowers or cashews is just as appropriate as adding peanuts, so go nuts! One rule of thumb, though-try out your Halloween trail mix before offering it to guests, as it is far preferable to take an unpleasant handful for yourself than hear about it from one of your friends!