BETTY SHIMABUKURO / BETTY@STARBULLETIN.COM Caleb Perez is looking ahead to Halloween with google eyes (recipe below.)

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Halloween's the time
for frosted eyeballs, orange
popcorn and buggy juice

Halloween treats are hands down the cleverest and the coolest of all holiday sugar gimmicks. This is the time you use red icing to make blood, stick worms in cupcakes and float fake spiders in the punch.

It's both fun and fairly gross, not just in effect, but because each creation is sweet enough to make your teeth hurt just contemplating a bite.

Take the edible eyeballs, pictured above. Each is made of a doughnut hole, covered in vanilla frosting and accented with a Gummi Lifesaver for the iris and a mini-M&M for the pupil. The doughnut itself is probably 75 percent sugar and the other ingredients work upward from there.

Today we present several especially wackadoo Halloween ideas - on this page and D4.

Hand any of these out at a party and the kids will make a gigantic mess, plus bounce toward the ceiling in sugar euphoria. But they will consider you the radical magician of cool, and that will be worth it.

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CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM Sugary popcorn can be colored to celebrate just about any holiday.

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Sugar-coated popcorn, tinted orange and green for the holiday, is a nice compromise - sweet, but not overwhelmingly so.

Terry Gruber has been searching for the recipe and Susy Kawamoto came forward with it. Kawamoto's was the best of several recipes sent in for variously titled Rainbow Popcorn, Sweetened Popcorn, Sugar Pop-

corn ...

Kawamoto is an accomplished baker who has helped solve many of our recipe mysteries. She jokes that when she returned to work recently after suffering a back injury, her colleagues' first question was, "Can you still bake?"

The technique here is to make a sugar syrup, color it and use it to coat the popcorn. Vigilance is the key: Undercook the syrup and it won't do the job; overcook it and it will become too dark and hard.

Kawamoto's tip is to keep the popcorn warm in the oven while the syrup is under way. This makes the popcorn easier to coat and keeps it from cooling faster than you can separate the kernels - so you don't end up with popcorn balls.

Depending on how accomplished you are with the syrup, the sugar coating on your popcorn may get a bit grainy as the popcorn sits, so it won't quite match the store-bought variety. "Who cares?" my daughter, the snack food queen, said. "It tastes exactly the same."

With that, I declare this mission accomplished.

Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

Place popcorn in a shallow pan and place in oven to keep warm.

In a heavy saucepan, melt the butter and add sugar, water and salt; stir until sugar is dissolved. Boil about 20 minutes, until syrup just begins to color (about 275 degrees on a candy thermometer; hardball stage). Watch syrup carefully once it reaches 250 degrees; it will darken quickly if it gets too hot. To test: Syrup should form a firm ball when dropped into cold water.

Add vanilla and food coloring. Stir well. Pour in a stream over warm popcorn and quickly stir to coat each piece. Pour popcorn onto a sheet of baking parchment paper and separate each kernel. Be careful; syrup will be hot. Coating will harden as popcorn cools. Store in an airtight container.

Nutritional information unavailable.

Clean-up tip: Soak syrup pot, popcorn pan and utensils in water after use. When the syrup cools it will harden stubbornly onto any surface. After a good soak, though, you can just rinse it out; no scrubbing.

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Google Eyes

Supplies: Glazed doughnut holes, vanilla frosting, Gummi Lifesavers, Mini-M&Ms, red food coloring, toothpick

How to: Frost doughnut holes. Press Lifesaver into top of doughnut; press M&M into center of Lifesaver. Color a small amount of frosting red and use toothpick to draw in red veins.

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Witch Hat

Supplies: 2 ounces semisweet chocolate, chocolate-coated sugar ice-cream cone, pumpkin-shaped sprinkles, waxed paper, 1 doughnut (any flavor), chocolate icing, nonpareils or sugar sprinkles, candy pieces (mini-Chiclets work well)

How to: Melt chocolate. Dip cone half-way lengthwise in chocolate. Immediately press candy pumpkins into chocolate. Place on waxed paper and let set. Frost top and side of doughnut with icing. Sprinkle with nonpareils or sprinkles. Center open end of cone over doughnut. Stick candy pieces around bottom of cone, with icing (cut large candy pieces into quarters).