Spooky sugar fix: 7 Halloween sweets

Pumpkin pop from Sweetie Licious

Roll up a couple of orange strips of marshmallow into a wheel, stack them kebab-style on a stick and you have – well, I’m not entirely sure what it was. A pumpkin monster? The marshmallow was much tougher than I was expecting it to be, and was coated in powdery sugar, which leaves a little trail of sugar behind you as you eat it. Definitely not a sneaky sweet – you won’t be able to chow down on this one in secret!

Ginny Wong

Almond finger cookies from Lucullus

The finger looked cool for Halloween and it’s also appropriately gross. The almond “fingernail” was good but the rest was very average. Maybe it would have been fun if it was filled with strawberry jam or something, and looked like it was squirting blood as you bit into it!

Young Wang

Purple sweet potato marshmallow from Meidi-Ya

Hongkongers have been adding purple sweet potato to everything recently, so it’s no surprise someone put a spooky twist on it. The thing about these sweets is, the marshmallows are shaped like a bear, or maybe a cat (the team couldn’t agree which). Sure they taste good but what does a cat or a bear have to do with Halloween? The only thing that made these sweets look like they were supposed to be on the Halloween shelf was the orange plastic bag they came in.

Tiffany Choi

Pumpkins King Size Version Peanut Butter Milk Chocolate from Reese’s

The Peanut Butter Pumpkins were ... well, they’re honestly just Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that sort of look like pumpkins. Disappointingly, they aren’t flavoured with pumpkin – but perhaps that’s for the better. Reese’s already taste as amazing as a combo of peanut butter and milk chocolate should do, so there’s really no need to mess with a winning formula.

Ginny Wong

Haribo Tangfastricks

I guess these would be a treat but the packet did promise tricks, like hot or sour gums, and we were so up for it. Pretty disappointing then when they weren’t any more hot or sour than the regular kind. The packaging is plastic and nothing special, but I’m glad to see that the sweets are not individually wrapped. So these can score a bit for being environmentally unscary. I’m sad that none of them were filled or really scary looking though. Boo!

Susan Ramsay

Pumpkin rock candy from Wonderland

First off, the only thing “pumpkin rock” about these “treats” is the image on the coffin-shaped box. It shows three pumpkin-headed rockers in a heavy metal band. Inside the box, though, are two kinds of boring sweets, both worthy of your grandmother’s ancient candy bowl. The first is something like a very thick candy heart. It’s chalky and powdery, and tastes of sugar and dust and not much else. The other is a round, orange, hard candy. Although really it’s orange in colour only. Once again, the flavour is limited to sugar. You’re better off saving this as something you can load your slingshot with, in case of a zombie attack.

Sam Gusway

Milky box snack from CLB

Once again, just like at mooncake time, the packaging is the entire product. Inside, it’s just plain white cookies. Tiny biscuits like these aren’t your typical Halloween treat (just imagine getting a loose bicky in your treat bag … weird) but they were surprisingly tasty. True, they had no weird marshmallow or gummy texture, and they weren’t in the shape of ghosts or pumpkins or anything scary (unless you think rectangles are scary – oooh! Four right-angles! Terrifying!), but they were one of the yummiest things we tried. A nice break from the lame gunk of most other Halloween sweets.

Sam Gusway