Five of the Best -- and Worst -- New Halloween Treats for 2014

Halloween season means we get homemade orange-iced cupcakes with too much icing, black ginger ale punch full of sodden gummy worms, and those little rolled fondant ghosts that somebody's auntie made by hand that everyone compliments but nobody actually eats. The store-bought treats usually end up being a slightly better mixed bag of either spectacularly good or hauntingly bad, and this year is no exception.

Here's a list of the Top Five Best and Worst New Halloween Treats for 2014. Prep yourselves for cheesy skeletons, the scariest milk in the known universe, and more candy corn things than should be allowed by law.

See also: Top Ten Grossest Halloween Party Foods

5) Hershey's Trifecta of Terror

Just when I thought Hershey's couldn't break my effin' heart any worse than when they yanked the mint miniatures and forced me to obtain them on Amazon at a wildly inflated price, this season they poured petrol on my feels and lit a giant match by introducing the foulest trio of signature Halloween candies I have ever tasted. Up first are the caramel apple Twizzlers: green apple licorice planks crammed full of caramel clay with some serious textural issues. Second is a hellish hell of white chocolate-filled pumpkin spice Hershey's Kisses that take over-spiced to some next level Glade living room candle shit. And third is the seasonal Candy Corn Crème bars -- available in snack size.

These bars are made of my two least favorite Halloween flavors: white chocolate and candy corn. They could just as easily be named "Sugary Wax and Stale Outdated Bits" bars.

These three candies are officially the ones you give out to all the neighborhood kids you would rather beat with a garden hose than see at your door on October 31.

4) Candy Corn Fruity Pebbles

Setting aside my inherent and well-documented loathing of candy corn, I have to give the candy corn Fruity Pebbles due credit for being a well-timed, well-themed addition to the Pebbles cereal family. Ten-year olds and cannabis aficionados everywhere should buy this because they were gonna buy it anyway it's colorful, contains added essential vitamins and minerals, and is customarily on sale because it's a seasonal item (breakfast cereal ain't gettin' any cheaper). The biggest selling point though is that the cereal doesn't really taste like candy corn at all -- it just taste like sugar.

A secondary advantage of the candy corn Fruity Pebbles? You can make Halloween crispies treats with them, because adding melted marshmallow goo to sugar pellets means plenty of double-sugar goodness.

3) TruMoo Orange Scream Milk

If there has ever been a worse idea for a Halloween-themed product introduced anywhere, ever, then I have not heard of it. Milk is delicious, and so is orange, but the container of fail-juice I found at my local King Soopers not only had me cursing the Great Pumpkin, it had a complete stranger behind me asking me if the orange milk was for real. Perhaps swilling dreamcicle extract on purpose, without having a gun held to your temple appeals to somebody, but whoever that person is needs to buy all of it to get it off the shelves before it scares the shit out of any more grown adults.

Milk should not make anyone scream. And if it does, chances are you are doing it very wrong.

For more good and bad 2014 Halloween treats, read on.

2) Kreepy Kakes and Ghostly Goodies.

Tastykake did it again. This company knows exactly what customers want, when they want it, and how cheap and good they want it to be. I would have been perfectly content to get a trick-or-treat butterscotch Krimpet, but instead I got to buy multiple boxes of Ghostly Goodies and Kreepy Kakes. The Goodies are soft, coconutty white cake discs covered with chocolate, and the Kreepies are crème-filled devil's food cupcakes with a thin strip of orange frosting and little bat and ghost jimmies.

I have heard tell that Tastykake also makes Witchy Treats -- white cake with chocolate frosting and orange sprinkles -- but I haven't seen them yet. I will obvs buy them, because things named after witches should be eaten often.

1) Cheetos Bag of Bones

There are a lot of Halloween treats that aren't my bag, but Cheetos decided that it would try to top last year's fan-fucking-tastic glow-in-the-dark snack bags with something that's definitely my bag -- my bag of bones. These full-sized bags of white Cheddar cheesy poofs are literally shaped like bones -- tiny skulls, ribs, leg bones and paw-bones -- and can be sort-of assembled to make Cheeto skellies, right on my computer desktop. Cheetos has made some creations over the years that reek of badassery, but this by far exceeds my wildest snack-chip dreams, because skulls and bones are cool, things shaped like them are cooler, and my otherwise favorite chips shaped like miniature dead bodies are so rad that I shed genuine tears of joy and exhilaration when I jogged to the store in my jammie-jams to find them there, waiting for me.

Now, if anyone important at Frito-Lay is listening, the only possible way they could top this year's Halloween Cheetos next year is to create an edible glow in the dark cheese powder for the bones, so that every kid and awesome adult trick-or treater ends up with glowy fingers.

I'll be eagerly awaiting that royalty check next year.

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