Halloween Treats - Completing the Severed Witch's Finger

Amy Bevins: Hi! I am Amy Bevins, I am a writer, an educator, and I am also a mom. Today, we are making tasty, creepy Halloween treats. Right now, we are working on Witches Fingers and we have already mixed together our shredded parmesan cheese, Italian seasoning, and our salt. The next step is to open our bread sticks and get started turning them into Witch s Fingers. Open them up and dump out the content, the bread sticks when you open them up usually come out in separate pieces. So, you are going to want to open them up and you are going to roll them between your hands until there about 6-8 inches long. Remember, we are making Witch s Fingers and not bread sticks. So, you want to make sure that they are a little bit lumpy and bumpy not smooth and pretty like if you are serving them for a nice Italian dinner or something; this is a Halloween treat. You are going to roll them lightly in your cheese mixture, you don t want to over cover them, but you just want to have them some nice flavor when you are done. You are going to take cooking sheet that you have already sprayed with some cooking spray, and you are going to place them on there and you can curve them around if you want them to look a little more evil looking. We are just going to roll up a couple here.

You are going to want to place them about 2 inches apart on your cooking sheet so that when they rise and bake in the oven, they are not going to stick together. You want to make them nice and irregular, witch looking, and one thing that you want to do is taper one end a little bit like the tip of the finger. We have a got a couple made here, you can see we are just kind of spreading them out on the plate and rolling them in the cheese, and if you forget you can always just roll them afterwards and it will nice and embedded in there, placing them on the tray. The next step is to add some fingernails to Witches Fingers because witches always have ghoulish looking fingernails, and this is where the red pepper and the green pepper come into play. I have already washed these so that they are nice and clean and ready to go, we are simply going to take a sharp knife and slice off a piece of pepper and you are going to make an irregular fingernail shape whatever shape looks good to you. It s kind of fun. You can use some red pepper and green pepper.

One trick that I have learned to help them adhere is to take a piece of paper towel and just dry them off a little bit before you stick them on. You are going to want to press them really firmly so that they get nice and embedded in there and then if they bake the fingernails will stay on; sometimes they do fall off during cooking and that s okay. We have a simple solution to fix them when you are all done, if the fingernails fall off, we are going to get them all ready to go and our oven is preheated to the temperature that it recommends on the can. It s usually around 350-375 degrees. So, once you have them all done with their fingernails, you are going to want to put them in the oven and they need to bake about 10-12 minutes, keep an eye on them because with the cheese on them they will brown really quickly. We have already got to set that we are made earlier. You can see what they look like when they are all done. They come out of the oven all crispy and crunchy and with a nice dark color to them. So, our next step is to put them on a plate and make sure they look really good. You want them to look really ghoulish and creepy. Sometimes they stick, so you might want a spatula. Simply slide them off, since you have already put cooking spray, they come off a lot more easily, and place them around on the plate, and sometimes if the fingernail does fall off there is real simple repair, it s a good idea to have a little cream cheese on hand, you can put a little cream cheese on it and stick it right back on looks great and the fingernail holds just fine. Now one fun thing about these is you can call them savored Witches Fingers and if you serve them with a side of marinara sauce, when you dip them in they look like they have been savored and not only that they taste wonderful. They are really good especially if you serve them a little bit warm, with some of the other things that we have made today like Bloody Worms and Eyeball Bites you have a complete dinner for your family. So, this is how you make Savored Witch s Fingers.

Next we are going to be making Crunchy Spiders. It s a fun Halloween dessert that kids are going to enjoy making right along with you.