Another Happy and Healthy Halloween!

As my costume post stated, Halloween is awfully close (only 32 days!) and I've started thinking about what kinds of treats I'll be handing out this year.  My daughter is still a little too young for trick-or-treating (I'm pretty sure it would just be me doing the work and her enjoying the candy!) so we'll spend our Halloween night handing out treats and enjoying all of the costumes.  While the jury still seems to be out on High-Fructose Corn Syrup and its risks (I found a good article about it from the Mayo Clinic), I think that this year I'll stay on the safe side and look for organic or home-made treats. 
There seem to be pros and cons to each option: organic candies can be expensive and home-made can take time and some know-how.  I'll have to look into both options before I make my choice!

Organic:
Naturalcandystore.com has some great Halloween options, but they can be expensive if you live in a high trick-or-treat traffic area.  I hate having to turn off my light early because I ran out of candy!  I do really like the sound of the Vegan Candy Party Mix. Everything comes individually wrapped, which makes it easy to hand out, but all of the wrapping is compostable.  The only disheartening thing is that price! Its hard to know that I could spend a fourth as much on regular candy, and the children wouldn't know the difference.  Another option is the individual chocolates from chocolatebar.com, the makers of the endangered species chocolate.  The individual milk chocolates sound great, and you get 144 for $39.99, which sounds okay, but is still pricey.

Home-made:
 I found some really great recipes for some home-made candy, some a little more involved than others.  This one for Fruit Jelly Chews seems the most labor intensive because you have to have a blender or food processor, but they sound great! One recipe for Maple Candy also sounds good, as long as you can find good, pure maple syrup.  The recipe for Chocolate Lollipops sounds easy, but I'd want to make sure I could find good, fair-trade chocolate.

The Decision:
I think that I'll try my hand at making the fruit chews to hand out, maybe make a trial run sometime this week. As a little extra treat for my daughter, I think I'll order her one of these cute Pumpkin Lollipops to enjoy for the night!