ding-dong spiders

I made the spiders from Matthew Mead's awesome Halloween Tricks and Treats book tonight for our annual Hallowe'en party tomorrow night.

They're not at all difficult to make, but they're "fiddly."

The bodies are Ding-Dongs, the legs are Pocky (these are chocolate-covered stick cookies from Japan; our grocery store has them in the Asian food aisle), the eyes and fangs are mini-marshmallows with melted-baking-chocolate pupils (Matthew's recipe called for candy googly-eyes -- which I couldn't find, but I have to admit I didn't look very hard -- so we improvised) and everything is held together with melted-baking-chocolate "glue." (Two melted squares of semi-sweet Bakers -- I just put them in a bowl and zapped them in the microwave for maybe 90 seconds -- was a bit more than enough to glue a total of 80 legs, 20 eyes, and 20 fangs onto 10 Ding-Dongs, and to make 20 pupils.)

I bought an extra box of Pocky because they break easily (there are about 20 to a box) and, eerily, I must have broken exactly 20, because we used them all exactly up.

We all keep giggling when we look at them. :D