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Halloween, Christmas, Easter, even Independence Day — it seems every season features a holiday notorious for producing excessive amounts of leftover candy in your home. While you can freeze leftover Halloween candy to keep it fresh for several months, it defeats the purpose if it takes up too much room in your freezer or becomes freezer-burned after being forgotten. One solution that will use up a boatload of candy without taking up any extra space is to fold it into store-bought ice cream.
This hack elevates both the candy and the ice cream by giving you bespoke flavors you can find nowhere else. It’s also so simple that you can recruit the kids to help, so they’ll feel good about donating their extra treats to an even tastier cause. Just let any plain flavor of ice cream (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, etc.) soften on the counter until it’s malleable enough to stir chopped candy into it, then pop it back into the freezer to harden. It’s that simple.
Of course, some candies work better for this than others. Reese’s eggs, for example, aren’t just America’s favorite Easter candy, they’re also the perfect addition to a quart of vanilla bean ice cream. Conversely, hard candies like peppermints, butterscotch, and Jolly Ranchers, or gummy candies like Swedish fish and jelly beans, will freeze into sugary gravel inside your ice cream, making it harder to scoop and eat. Softer chocolates, caramels, and creamy candies are the best choice for this clever ice cream upgrade.
Creative confectionery combinations
If Christmas candies are your weakness, we suggest stashing away a few quarts of French vanilla or even making your own batch of easy three-ingredient chocolate ice cream. These flavors complement most traditional Christmas candies, including Ghirardelli Peppermint Bark Squares, seasonal Hershey’s Kisses flavors, and gift boxes of various flavors of chocolate truffles and bonbons.
For those with an abundance of sweets from trick-or-treating, you’ll likely have an abundance of smaller candies on hand, such as M&Ms, fun-size Snickers and Milky Ways, and individually wrapped Reese’s peanut butter cups. Since these candies come in smaller packages, feel free to mix together your favorites and sink them into a velvety pint of vanilla bean ice cream. Think crunchy M&Ms together with Snickers peanuts and caramel, or salty Reese’s PB with Milky Way nougat.
If the Easter bunny loves your house, you can try blending your springtime treats with a few different flavors of ice cream. Vanilla and chocolate are always a given, but how tasty would mini Cadbury creme eggs be in strawberry ice cream, or even raspberry sherbet? Chop up those enormous chocolate bunnies and blend them with crunchy malted milk eggs to elevate classic peanut butter swirl into moose tracks — or bunny tracks, in this case. The best part is that you can crush up those hard candies and sprinkle them on top of each serving.
