So what can you do with leftover Halloween candy?

Are you nuts? Who has left over candy?

Well, it happens every year at my house.

Every Halloween Lizzie goes from house to house trick-or-treating. When she gets home, she eats what she wants and what she doesn’t eat, she stores in her secret hiding place.

Jason and I grab what we want of the leftovers.

He will put the Reese’s Cups and Twix in the refrigerator and I’ll take the Sweet Tarts and Skittles and hide them. Then the rest of the random stuff sits in a bowl it seems for months and months on end.

I guess it’s been this way forever.I can remember growing up my sister and I would go trick-or-treating and it would happen the same way. We would go from house to house gathering candy and I would be the one stashing my candy in my secret hiding place.

My mom would take what was leftover and make a sweet apple salad for us.

It was always so good, but now that I think about it, it was her sneaky way of getting us to eat our fruit, too.

She would also crush candies in our ice cream, use M&Ms and gummy bears to top ice cream sundaes with and she would even keep some of the candy until Christmas to decorate her gingerbread men, women and houses.

You don’t have to eat all of the leftover candy, just bake it into something.Here’s the recipe my mom would fix for us using apples.It’s so good you’ll be able to sneak in fruit into your child’s diet, too.

Apple Candy Bar Salad

4 Granny Smith apples, chopped

1 package instant vanilla pudding mix

1 cup milk

1 cup Spanish peanuts

Candy Bars ñ Snickers, Baby Ruth and/or 3 Musketeers

8 oz. Cool Whip

Mix the pudding and milk until smooth and thick.Cut the apples and candy bars up into small pieces and mix them with the thawed Cool Whip.

If the candy is too mushy to cut, put it in the fridge for a few hours.

Add pudding to cool whip mixture.Mix well and refrigerate.

Tiffany Cannon is a field editor for Taste of Home Magazine.