Yep, it's one big particle emitter. No gravity but a small starting velocity, a small sprite texture scaled up x2, a random angle and slightly random direction, one-shot with some explosiveness.
It does mean that I don't switch the entire scene on changing levels, just the "level" node gets swapped out, but the particle emitter node is outside that so it hangs around.
There's also a couple of particle emitters on the tree, and one that triggers when the player gets squished. Same sprite, just played around with the settings.