Halloween Treat: Betty Crocker Witches’ Brooms

This recipe for Betty Crocker Witches’ Brooms came to me from Ava after my cinnamon witch’s broom turned out to be so difficult to make! Thanks so much Ava!

You begin with a cookie dough that is kind of weird. No eggs or leavener. You combine the sugar, butter, water and vanilla, then mix in flour and salt. Super easy!

You are supposed to shape the dough into 20 1 1/4″ balls. I measured the dough with my mini ice cream scoop which worked out perfectly. Finally, a recipe that is clear when it comes to volume and output!

You are supposed to use pretzels for the broomstick but I had some breadsticks so I used them instead. I just snapped them in half and added the ball of dough to the broken end. The recipe says to press the dough down onto the broomstick and then add bristles with the tines of a fork. Um… that just makes a flatten ball? It does not make it look like the photo at all. I shaped it into a triangular shape on my own and then added the bristles.

You bake the broomsticks in a 350F oven for about 12 minutes but you can not decorate them until they have cooled off.

I gently and slowly melted the chocolate chips with some shortening. The recipe says to “Spoon melted chocolate over brooms, leaving about 1 inch at the top of the pretzel handle and bottom halves of cookie bristles uncovered” but if you look at their photo, their pretzels are barely covered in chocolate. Confusing! I just experimented instead. Some sticks almost entirely covered, some not.

When it comes to the butterscotch drizzle, again the recipe was not very descriptive. It just said to drizzle with melted butterscotch chips. Drizzle what? Drizzle how???

To get the effect they did in their photo, I melted approximately 1/3 of a cup of butterscotch chips in a double boiler with 1 tsp of shortening until it was nice and smooth. Then I spooned it into a small ziploc bag, cut a super tiny hole in one of the corners and then did the diagonal drizzle over the areas with chocolate:

If you tried to do this effect with just melted butterscotch and a spoon you would not have gotten such a pretty look. I will be honest, at this point of the recipe I almost considered skipping the butterscotch drizzle entirely but don’t! The drizzle adds so much flavour and really makes these treats delicious, not to mention very pretty.

These witches’ brooms are timing consuming and a tad laborious but totally worth it. My husband and I were shocked at how much we liked them. I was convinced they were a treat I would never make again, especially since the directions in the recipe kind of let me down, but I enjoyed eating them so much I would probably go to the effort to make them again.

Despite crappy instructions, this recipe was very accurate when it came to how long the prep would take, the total time and the output of the recipe. Taking everything into consideration, I give this recipe four out of five wooden spoons.