Armed with a print-out from Allrecipes.com and a little bit of chutzpah, I set about making a tasty fall treat for my Halloween pot luck at the office tomorrow: candy corn bark. Had I heard of this sort of snack? No — but it’s delicious!

I ran into a few problems right off the bat while gathering my ingredients at Target last night: They did not carry the specific type of chocolate cookies the recipe calls for, and they were sold out of white chocolate baking chips. Not a great start! But I improvised: they did have graham crackers (I figure chocolate, grahams . . . you know where I’m headed with this!) and plenty of milk chocolate baking chips. I know that “improvising” isn’t usually a good idea for an inexperienced chef, but I was exhausted after a very long day . . . and Mom and I were not about to head over to a grocery store.

So I had all of this:

And I set to work! I laid out all the grahams (broken into small squares) across a cookie sheet covered in wax paper, then broke the pretzels into halves and laid them across the cookies.

Melting the chocolate was the next daunting task . . . so I grabbed myself a silver bowl, poured in all of my chocolate chips and brought a pot of water to a boil.

But you have to check out the chocolate first:

Not scalding myself while dropping the bowl of chocolate over the boiling water was a bit intimidating, and I had to call my dad in during a very minor panic attack. All was well, though. I managed to not scald myself, melted all of the chocolate down to a yummy sauce and didn’t burn it! Win!

After the chocolate was melted, all that was left was to carefully spoon it over my cookies and pretzels — making sure to move quickly so the chocolate wouldn’t harden before I needed it to. As I worked in sections across the cookie sheet, I dropped a few candy corns along my work area — then doused some awesome fall sprinkles over my work. And, to my utter relief, it turned out well!

I didn’t really follow the recipe (I omitted several items and added new ones), but I’m happy with the overall product. I broke it into pieces and packaged it up for the potluck tomorrow.

It’s like a chocolatey fall trail mix! Not exactly what I’m going for, but hey — it has sweet, it has salty, it’s a dessert. We’ll roll with it!

I posted the recipe earlier, too, if you’re interested!