Food You Can Eat: Two Terrifying Dessert Salads, Perfect for Halloween

Let me explain. Halloween 2020 pretty much didn’t happen here in hyper-vigilant Gotham. I knew we weren’t having anyone over or going out ourselves. Nonetheless, I bought a bag of Snickers to contribute to the front desk to be doled out to the trick-or-treaters. This was an annual tradition. If you’re wondering, the most popular items every year are Snickers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, so apparently the neighborhood little wanderers suffer from no peanut allergies.

The desk person told me that not only were they not allowing trick-or-treaters into the lobby, Covid precautions, but because of “civic unrest” (this is true, there was “civic unrest”, but we don’t live on top of a police station or the Prada store in SoHo or in the men’s department in Macy’s) the doors would be locked for the evening.

Sad. Undaunted, I made two dessert salads that proved to be as terrifying as their name suggested, but they were actually edible. Halloween was a Saturday last year, so I made the Watergate salad on Friday night and the Apple/Snickers on Saturday night.

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Watergate Salad, aka Pistachio Delight

(serves 2)  

In a medium bowl, combine 1/2 package (about 2 oz.) pistachio pudding mix with 1 cup milk. Fold in 1/2 cup Cool Whip. To this, add 4 oz. crushed pineapple from a can, about 5 oz. mini-marshmallows, and 3 tbsp. toasted coconut (this you can find in the baking aisle.) Mix well and refrigerate. When ready to send Better Half running for the hills serve, place in small bowls or goblet-like glasses, to up the Gothic horror aspect, and sprinkle over a little more of the coconut. 

This is surprisingly edible, but I like pistachio and pineapple and coconut. The Better Half not so much.

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Apple Salad Using Your Bag of Halloween Snickers Candy

(serves 2)

At a loss for what to do with all these “fun-size” Snickers mini-bars, because no one was in the mood to touch anything that didn’t come from their own household at the time, I came across this somewhere. I was actually kind of intrigued, because it’s a combination of apples, caramel, chocolate, and nuts. The results were…but at least I had all the ingredients.

Core and dice but do not peel 2 Granny Smith apples, and mix them with about half a reasonably sized bag of the useless-to-you “fun-size” Snickers. I no doubt got these at CVS, and checking their website, I see that the bag was precisely 9.14 oz., so let’s say 5 oz. Cut each of the fun-sized pieces in half or quarters and try to get the apple slices to match in size. Save a little bit of the apple and the Snickers, so mix 90% of it together.

Since you’re not making much, in a small bowl combine 1 oz. of cheesecake-flavored pudding mix with 2 oz. cream cheese. You can do this with a spoon. Stir in 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract and then fold in 4 tbsp. Cool Whip, which you have leftover from your Watergate Salad misadventure.

Add this to the bowl with the apples and the Snickers and stir to combine. Top with the reserved apples and Snickers chunks, then squirt over chocolate sauce. If you make your own, let it cool down but it obviously needs to remain in liquid form; room temp. is best.

Chill this until ready to serve. 

I don’t how to rate this. The taste wasn’t bad, maybe 7/10. The mouth-feel more like 2 or 3/10. It’s suspiciously like something the Mars company would have dreamed up to move product during the non-Halloween season. Who knows. I bet kids would like it. I came thisclose to heating the whole thing and then chilling/freezing it, but with so much non-food in it (the Snickers, the Cool Whip) I probably would have only made things worse.