Leftover Halloween chocolate goes into cookies and rotli

Leena Patel sprinkles chopped chocolate from small Halloween bars onto a hot rotli, folds it over and waits about a minute for the chocolate to melt. Patel, a retired transit dispatcher, uses about a tablespoon per rotli so the filling stays inside.

What can a household make with the Halloween chocolate it didn’t eat? Five of the six households Bonzai heard from baked chopped candy into cookies. Patel used a freshly cooked flatbread instead, adding the chocolate after it left the pan.

Denise Baptiste, a customer-service representative at Elm Cart, chopped milk-chocolate bars, including a few with caramel, for her nephews’ cookies. Priya Desai, owner at Ember & Bean, and Rosa Gutierrez, a school counselor, each replaced the chips in their usual cookie dough with chopped bars and peanut butter cups. Nadia Rahman, a pediatric nurse, mixed milk-chocolate and caramel bars into cookies on her day off. Graham Okafor, a retired building superintendent, said her husband chopped the chocolate left in their bowl for chocolate chunk cookies; they gave the rest of the candy to neighbors.

Baptiste left out the chocolate chips and cut her dough’s sugar from three-quarters of a cup to half a cup. She baked the cookies at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes, until the edges looked golden. Desai also cut the sugar, by about a quarter cup. Rahman used a little less chocolate than usual because the bars were sweet, while Gutierrez used about a cup of candy in place of chips. Okafor said she did not know whether her husband changed anything else in his recipe.

The candy made its presence known in different ways. Baptiste said the caramel turned a little chewy and her nephews asked for another batch. Rahman found soft centers with pockets of caramel, and her family finished the cookies quickly. Desai chilled her dough for about half an hour before scooping it: “Chilling helped—the peanut butter cups stayed mostly in little pockets instead of spreading across the tray.” Gutierrez’s peanut butter cups softened and partly melted, while the milk chocolate stayed in chunks; her children liked both. Okafor ate two of her husband’s cookies warm, with melted-chocolate pockets, but could not tell them from his usual batch.

Patel kept her chocolate off the pan because, she said, it could burn there. Folded into the finished rotli, it melted into a slightly messy filling that her grandson liked. Patel ate a piece, too.

For these six households, leftover Halloween chocolate became chopped candy in five batches of cookies and a melted filling in one hot rotli. The cookie makers varied the dough and candy; Patel let the bread’s heat do the work.

Her grandson counts the rotlis Patel makes each night and watches the last one closely: It might have chocolate inside.