Halloween Candy Buttons

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve posted some quick and easy Halloween desserts, like candy corn meringue swirls and candy corn oreo bark. Well, this week turned out to be yet another busy week for me (cake baking, birthday parties, etc.), so in keeping with that quick and easy Halloween treat theme, I want to share a super fun, and easily customizable dessert with you: candy buttons. Not only can you customize them in terms of colors, but you can create a lot of fun flavor variations. And best of all, they come together super quick!

Halloween Candy Buttons
Makes about 10 strips (60 dots per strip) of candy buttons

What you’ll need:
1 lb. powdered sugar
4 tbsp. meringue powder
1/2 cup water
1 tsp. extract
Food coloring
Parchment paper

To make things a little easier on yourself, I recommend starting by printing out this template and cutting up your parchment strips. The icing will start to crust fairly quickly, so doing your prep work beforehand is important.

For those of you that don’t know, candy buttons are essentially royal icing, so we’ll be mixing up our icing the exact same way we’d make royal icing. In a large bowl, combine your meringue powder and water, and whisk until the powder has dissolved and the mixture is frothy. Add your extract and powdered sugar, and beat on high with an electric mixer until stiff peaks form. If you’re wondering why I’m not specific about the kind of extract I’m using, it’s because this is what I was talking about earlier when I said you could customize the flavor. The possibilities are truly only limited by the extracts you can get your hands on! That being said, if you plan on making white dots, I recommend limiting your extracts to clear extracts, otherwise your dots will be off-white. For me, this means using almond, peppermint, or clear vanilla extracts, although you can see that I also have bubblegum and raspberry extracts as well (which are slightly pink and would have tinted the white dots).

Once you have your royal icing, separate what you’re going to use into individual bowls and tint them whatever colors you’d like to use. Since we’re nearing Halloween, I chose to make candy corn colored dots, black/orange dots, and black/green/purple dots. Mix in your food coloring, and thin the royal icing to a 20 second consistency (that means dropping a blob of icing back in the bowl would take about 20 seconds to completely be reabsorbed). Spoon your icing into piping bags (or into the corner of resealable plastic bags) and pipe your icing onto your parchment strips using the template as a guide.

To get nice, round dots, trying using a circular motion while piping, keeping the tip of your bag low to the parchment.

Now wasn’t that easy peasy?! Although I enjoy difficult projects that allow me to push my limits and improve my skills in baking/decorating, I also like to have quick and easy desserts to fall back on when I’m in a pinch for time. What’s your favorite quick and easy dessert? Share it with us in the comments!

Happy baking!