Happy Healthy Halloween!

Halloween is approaching and you are going to organize a small party for your children and you don't know what snacks to prepare? Well, this article is just for you, I wrote a few tips and you have a lot to look forward to.

We only started celebrating Halloween after my husband and I moved to Geneva. For us, it's an event where we get together with friends, carve pumpkins, come up with different costumes and prepare food in a spooky theme. Since we have a son, it's even more fun for me, because I try other options to entice him to healthy but funny snacks, and when he then enjoys it together with his friends from kindergarten, it's the greatest reward for me. I wrote down for you my most favorite snacks, ready in a few minutes, together with cupcakes, which I tried for the first time this year and they had great success. Let me know if you liked them too ;-)

Halloween snacks ideas

• Fingers from carrots, cream cheese and almonds

• Chopped cucumbers and peppers topped with cashew nut dip and hummus

• Ghosts of Gruyere cheese

• Crackers with sesame, flax and sunflower seeds

• Tangerines with pieces of cucumber

• Spider eggs from black olive

• Pumpkin Cupcakes (see recipe below)

• A mixture of nuts

• 80% Dark chocolate

Preparation time: 30 minutes 
Portion: for 4 people
Designation: Vegetarian

Pumpkin Cupcakes

You can enjoy these cupcakes for breakfast sprinkled with cinnamon, for an afternoon snack with a mug of hot chocolate, or you can decorate them with cream and chocolate and add them to Halloween snacks.

Ingredients:

• 1/4 of a medium pumpkin

• 2 ripe bananas

• 1 cup of buckwheat flour

• 1 cup of almond flour

• 2 room-temperature eggs

• A teaspoon of cinnamon

• A teaspoon of vanilla

• Chopped dark chocolate with nuts ( 1/2 a bar)

• Almond milk (to balance the consistency)

• Muffin tin

• A tablespoon of coconut fat + to wipe the mold

Topping

• Quark cheese (curd)

with cinnamon or melted 80% chocolate

Preparation time: 40 minutes 
Portion: for 6 people
Designation: Vegetarian

Direction:

1. Cut the pumpkin into pieces and let it boil in water until it becomes soft (approx. 15 min).

2. Meanwhile, mix well in a bowl all the loose ingredients - buckwheat flour, almond flour, cinnamon and vanilla and put it aside.

3. In another bowl, mash the bananas separately add the cooked pumpkin and mash as well.

4. Then add the beaten eggs, coconut oil and mix with a fork.

5. Grease your muffin tin with coconut oil.

6. Then slowly mix the liquid and loose parts together and finally add chopped chocolate and nuts. If the mixture is too stiff, add 1-2 tablespoon of almond milk.

7. Place in a preheated oven at 150 degrees and bake for about 30 minutes or until golden.

8. Leave the muffins to cool in the tin or on a wire rack, where you can decorate them straight away. For decoration fill the piping bag with quark cheese as you can see in the 3rd picture.

9. Serve while still warm or you can store it in the fridge for 2 days.

Nutritional point

Sugar

Halloween, like other holidays such as Easter and Christmas, tempts people to buy all kinds of candies, bars and other highly processed foods full of sugar. Let's try it a little differently this year. I offer you a recipe that is sweet and tasty, even though it does not contain any refined sugar. Sugar is contained here in its natural form in bananas and pumpkin together with fiber. Fiber is a form of complex carbohydrates, it passes unchanged through the digestive tract and can regulate the level of glucose in the blood, so there are no extreme fluctuations in glycemia, as is the case with ultra-processed sweets. In order to preserve the fiber, I do not recommend blending but only mash with a fork.

Furthermore, the sweet taste is of course caused by chocolate, my son would not allow it to be left out :-) So I choose dark chocolate - the higher the percentage, the better. For example 80% dark chocolate contains only 20% of sugar and the rest is cocoa. Cocoa is rich in antioxidants, zinc, magnesium, iron and tryptophan. Eating quality dark chocolate in moderation also increases our performance and ability to concentrate.

You may still be wondering why I used quark cheese to decorate the cupcake. It has a better consistency for decorating than yogurt and is also a source of protein and fat, so together with complex carbohydrates it is ideally filling and children do not tend to overeat. Enjoy and have a Happy Healthy Halloween!