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Need ideas: inexpensive EASY chocolate treats
abasket
20002 replies886 threads Senior Member
in Parent Cafe
@doschicos for another fundraising idea. 
Let's see how creative you are.
Last year my organization was involved in a "Chocolate Crawl" - happens in a small college town. Local businesses and organizations host a crawl stop - and each stop features some type of "bite sized" chocolate treat. People buy tickets to attend (I forget...$10-20/ticket?) and can stop at each crawl stop and indulge. It's done on a Friday evening in winter and they only sell 500 tickets - sells out every year.
So that means I need to come up with an inexpensive easy chocolate ingredient based treat to share at my table. Some places get fancy (a couple restaurants had fancy one bite chocolate desserts) and others (IMO) whimp out and pass out bite sized candy bars.
I will need to have 500 of whatever. And I need to do this on a VERY tight budget. Last year (I'm a children's literacy program) I did individual Oreo cookies wrapped in Saran, tied with a ribbon with a "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" sticker on it - IYGAMAC was the theme of our table. Not hugely creative, but people liked that it was wrapped and so they could take it and not have to eat it right away! It also appealed to families that came with children.
Ideas???? It also has to be easy to serve. One thing I just thought about as I typed this was puppy chow. Does have peanut butter in it so would have to deal with peanut allergies....
The presentation is almost as important as the treat. People like nice things! One organization last year literally took a bunch of Little Debbie treats and cut them up in like 3-4 pieces for each item. Let me tell you 500 cut up swiss cake rolls or peanut butter bars just looks like a mess!
And just for the record someone else ALWAYS does chocolate covered pretzels.
53 replies Let's see how creative you are.
Last year my organization was involved in a "Chocolate Crawl" - happens in a small college town. Local businesses and organizations host a crawl stop - and each stop features some type of "bite sized" chocolate treat. People buy tickets to attend (I forget...$10-20/ticket?) and can stop at each crawl stop and indulge. It's done on a Friday evening in winter and they only sell 500 tickets - sells out every year.
So that means I need to come up with an inexpensive easy chocolate ingredient based treat to share at my table. Some places get fancy (a couple restaurants had fancy one bite chocolate desserts) and others (IMO) whimp out and pass out bite sized candy bars.
I will need to have 500 of whatever. And I need to do this on a VERY tight budget. Last year (I'm a children's literacy program) I did individual Oreo cookies wrapped in Saran, tied with a ribbon with a "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" sticker on it - IYGAMAC was the theme of our table. Not hugely creative, but people liked that it was wrapped and so they could take it and not have to eat it right away! It also appealed to families that came with children.
Ideas???? It also has to be easy to serve. One thing I just thought about as I typed this was puppy chow. Does have peanut butter in it so would have to deal with peanut allergies....
The presentation is almost as important as the treat. People like nice things! One organization last year literally took a bunch of Little Debbie treats and cut them up in like 3-4 pieces for each item. Let me tell you 500 cut up swiss cake rolls or peanut butter bars just looks like a mess!
And just for the record someone else ALWAYS does chocolate covered pretzels.
Replies to: Need ideas: inexpensive EASY chocolate treats
If you want to go with a literary theme again, perhaps something around Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You could use the fun sized hershey bars or hershey kisses. One could have a gold sticker on it which wins a copy of the book.
Admittedly, I'm largely a one man show. So if I'm making 500 something it has to be PRETTY QUICK!
The event is around Valentine's Day. This could be kind of fun. Looks kiddish but recently we had an event with light up rings and our medical residents were fighting over them!
To be clear, all ages kids - through senior adults will be at this event.
https://www.momontimeout.com/bring-on-bling-valentine-ring-craft/
I'm going to start pulling any Charlie and The Chocolate Factory books that might get donated just in case!
What could be neat about that for you even with sugar is you can get some kind of clever molds that suit the occasion. Hopefully some that let you make like 50 at a time
my family and I all like homemade treats for sure . . .
but I think wrapping 500 things would be hard. Maybe you could have little snack sized sandwich bags nearby and people could put their own treat in a bag?
Here's one idea that was a huge hit, and probably cheap at our swim team potlucks - chocolate graham cereal bars. (chocolate, grahams and mini marshmallows) cut into bars. They look super tasty and always disappeared. Recipes are all over online if googled.
Cake pops are easy to make and if dipped in a coating, they are pretty durable on their own. (cake crumbled up, mixed with frosting, made into balls, chilled and dipped) Also, Oreo balls are similar and really good.
My favorite recipe from 30 yrs ago: snickers brownies, but you'd have to find some other type of caramel than the wrapped single Kraft caramels.
These windowpane pretzel treats are my favorite easy and inexpensive chocolate treat. I do not use Kisses but use the candy melts like Wiltons, which always go on sale super cheap. You just need to be careful in the micro and I usually use the defrost setting. You can do a large plate at a time.
https://www.food.com/recipe/easy-festive-chocolate-holiday-pretzels-104975
I'm currently thinking about doing a Valentine's Puppy Chow. Puppy chow with Valentine M and M's. Serve it in a pretty cupcake liner or even one of those plastic containers with a lid - I could then stick one of our program stickers on top - and our logo is red and white!
But your ideas have given me some good thought!
Another good one is Christmas crack. Very easy to make and a crowd pleaser for sure. You can also add M&Ms to the top. I won a cookie bake off at work with this recipe and made my batch in the morning before I went into work, that's how quick and easy it is.
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/christmas_crack/
500 cookies is a lot of cookies!