Leftover Candy Cookie Cake
Leftover Halloween candy? You can eat it plain… or you can turn it into an outrageous soft and chewy candy cookie cake filled with all your favorite chocolate! Perfect for Halloween, Valentine’s Day, wedding candy bars, birthday party pinatas, or any occasion that leaves you with an assortment of candy!
Okay, this title is a little bit of a misnomer. You don’t have to use leftover candy.
You could go to the store and buy all NEW candy just for this candy cookie cake. And if you don’t have any candy on hand, you totally should, because it is just that good.
What to Do With Leftover Halloween Candy
Buuuuut it’s almost Halloween, so there’s a good chance you’re about to have some leftover candy on your hands — or the perfect excuse to go buy a big bag of assorted candy at half off!
Now, you could eat all that candy straight out of the bag. (And I support this, because I am pro-candy.)
Or you can bake with it. And given that this is a baking-based food blog, I’m pretty sure you can guess which option I’m going to suggest.
Have Snickers? Make these snickers cheesecake bars.
Peanut Butter Cups? Allow me to suggest this peanut butter cup cheesecake dip. Or perhaps a chocolate peanut butter cup layer cake. Maybe this one bowl chocolate peanut butter cup bundt cake is more your style?
Too many M&Ms? I have you covered, with M&M pretzel kisses, soft and chewy M&M pudding cookies, or a no-bake M&M peanut butter pretzel pie.
Or you can use all your assorted leftover candy and turn it into a delicious, both crispy and chewy, decadent, chocolate-filled candy cookie cake. Because, yes.
What is a Cookie Cake?
We’ve had the cake hierarchy discussion on here before. Ice Cream Cake > Cookie Cake > Regular Cake. Not to hate on regular cake or anything — it definitely has its time to shine.
But what’s better than cake? A giant cookie turned into a cake! And especially a giant candy cookie cake.
It’s like all the best parts of a cookie, but even better. Because it’s one GIANT cookie cake, the outside can get nice and crispy and the inside can stay ooey-gooey and soft.
I like to load of up my cookie cake with brown sugar to keep it extra soft and moist – it almost feels undercooked in the middle (but fret not – perfectly cooked and safe to eat!).
What kind of candy should you use in a candy cookie cake?
As far as what kind of candy to add to your leftover candy cookie cake? Whatever you like! I stuck with chocolate-based candy, because I wasn’t sure how well Swedish Fish or skittles would work.
This version here has peanut M&Ms (my personal most favorite candy), Snickers, Butterfingers, Crunch, KatKats, 3 Musketeers, Milky Ways (my personal least favorite candy), Twix, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, and a surrounding ring of Whoppers.
You could stick with all one kind of candy, but when it comes to candy, I kinda feel like variety really is the spice of life.
So set aside a little candy before you hand it out for Halloween. Or raid your kid’s Trick or Treat bag. Hit up the supermarket the day after Halloween (or Valentine’s Day!) for some half price candy.
However you do it, this Leftover Candy Cookie Cake is sure to be a big hit!
More Cookie Cake Recipes:
- S’mores Cookie Cake
- Giant Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie
- Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake
- Peanut Butter Cup Cookie Cake
Leftover Candy Cookie Cake
A giant soft and chewy cookie cake, filled with all your favorite candy.
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter, room temperature
- 1 cup brown sugar, packed
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 2 eggs, room temperature
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 2 1/2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 cups assorted candy, chopped, plus more for decorating
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 °F. Lightly grease a 9″ springform pan, cake tin, or pie plate.
- Beat together butter and sugars using an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add in the eggs, one at a time, followed by the vanilla. Slowly add in the dry ingredients, continuing to mix just until no streaks of flour remain. Stir in the chopped candy.
- Transfer the cookie dough into the prepared pan. Spread to the edges and smooth using a spatula. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean.
- While still warm, press additional candy into the top of the cookie cake. Cool completely before slicing and serving.
Notes
Baked, fully cooled candy cookie cake can be wrapped in two layers of aluminum foil and stored in the freezer for up to 3 months. Thaw at room temperature overnight before slicing.
A Bunsen Burner Bakery Original Protocol
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This is probably a more popular solution to leftover candy than my trick of … er.. throwing it all away. Lol. Nom 😀
What a great idea for this time of year!! I always have leftover candy and putting it into a cookie cake is the best idea! YUM
This is the best part of Halloween Julie. . .transforming all that left over candy destined to sit all lonely in the bottom of a drawer into a delicious little cake. It really is a fun idea and I bet the kiddos would go crazy over it. . .I mean. . .cake. . .and candy all wrapped up into one.
Yummm!! I love cookie cakes and this is so fun with the leftover candy!! I love gooey cakes and this looks so incredibly scrumptious. I can’t wait to make it!!
I alway take those mini candies to my office this time of year and now I need to bake with them too! Thanks for sharing a great recipe.
Ha! I used to raid my kids candy bags making sure they ok and secretly eating all the chocolate. I could have done this instead!
First of all, I’m all over any method to use up leftover candy. And second, this is super cute!
What a fun way to use up leftover candy, I LOVE this:)
What a great idea for “leftover” candy! This recipe is worth running to the market for some.
“Left over candy”… what kind of imaginationland is this!? 😉
What a great idea for using up leftover candy. I bet it’s a big hit with kids and adults too!!
Henry actually went trick-or-treating for the first time this year, which he *sort of* understood, but lucky for me he’s still too little to actually understand and ask to eat his candy! (It probably helps that he never really eats it, so I’m not sure he even gets what’s in the wrapper.) Soo, as a result, yes, I have a handful of candy that no one is going to eat, except unfortunately me. Making this cake (and taking it to the office, ha!) would be the perfect solution!
This year was Ryan’s first trick or treating, too — he LOVED it! Mostly I think he liked carrying a tiny bag and putting pieces of candy in it. We let him choose two tiny pieces last night and then hid the rest, haha. We always give away play-doh and glow stick bracelets (in addition to candy, of course) so the littlest trick or treaters have something fun they can use, but even the big kids seemed to take a lot of the play-doh, too!
We always have SO much leftover Halloween candy and I never know what to do with it. Can’t wait for Wednesday so I can make this cookie cake. Will definitely be putting two of my favorites, Twix and Reeses, in mine!
Mmmm Twix are one of my favorites, too!