Who Knew It Was So Hard To Be Charitable?

My husband and I are on a low-carb diet, which meant no sweets for V-day. But I just HAD to make something! Who could I bake for? Our local hospital has a big children's center so I called them to ask if we could bring Valentine treats to the kids. They said no. So I then called the children's shelter and asked if we could bring THEM Valentine treats. They said no. SERIOUSLY!!?? My husband and I have always talked about getting DeVon into volunteering and community service, but there's nothing that'll let you volunteer before 8 years old. We thought something like this would be a good start. Now we're back to square one. Does anybody have any ideas for getting involved in the community with a 2 year old?


So in the end, I settled for making treats for my husband's team at work. I was going to go all out. Cake balls, cookies, fudge, smores. Whatever I could make, I was going to. That didn't happen. I needed something quick and simple since I have no extra time on the weekends. I settled on dipped pretzel sticks.

They turned out really good. Not pretty, but tasty! I know these don't require any kind of tutorial, but going in I had no strategy, so I'll share mine with you

First, the ingredients

Simple enough. I ended up only using the white chocolate chips. I used almost all the sprinkles though and not quite the whole bag of pretzels. So here's the strategy. Melt the chocolate chips in the microwave at 50% power stirring every minute. This worked like a charm. I started out just dipping the pretzel into the bowl, but about halfway through, I found that scooping chocolate onto the spatula then rolling the pretzel on the spatula worked better. With chocolate chips (rather than dipping chocolate), after you dip the pretzel, you have to hold it a little bit to let it firm up. Toward the end I found that holding the pretzel horizontal and shaking/letting the extra chocolate fall off so there's not too much worked well.

I chose to roll mine in sprinkles rather than sprinkle them with sprinkles. To do this, pour the sprinkles on a plate and create a mound of sprinkles. When you're rolling the pretzels, make sure none of the white chocolate touches the plate. If the chocolate touches the plate, the sprinkles will stick to it and the chocolate will harden, causing you to have to move to a different spot on the plate and wasting a lot of sprinkles. So remember: MOUND of sprinkles, not a layer, on the plate. You can see here that at the beginning I just had a layer and after just the first pretzel I already had a mess.

I didn't have any wax paper so I settled on using my cutting boards. They worked perfectly. The pretzels didn't stick at all

They tasted amazing - like circus animal cookies but with salt. I'm a sucker for white chocolate pretzels. I'm not much of a plain pretzel person, but these Snyder pretzels were really good! What diet? Oh well :)


Linking to:
Today's Creative Blog
A Diamond in the Stuff