Sweet Treats

Yeah, I suppose I should have posted this before Christmas, but that just didn't happen. Sorry.

I made several different sweet treats for the MOMS Club cookie exchange and to put in some gift bags. Some old favorites, some I've always wanted to try, and a couple of new ideas from Pinterest.

I had Peeper help me with the pretzel treats, which maybe wasn't such a good idea.


There! 104 pretzels, all laid out in a grid, while she watched!

"Dere! I spread dem out for you!"

Can you get which Candy Cane Kisses I put on, and which she did?

There was a lot of this.

Finally ready to melt. Did I really neglect to take a photo of the finished product? Oh well, they look the same as previous years.

The rest, I did on my own.

That night, after Peeper was in bed, I made mint hot chocolate truffles, based on this recipe that I found on Pinterest.

The original recipe calls for: 

12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips (about 2 cups)
1 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon sugar (optional)
1/8 teaspoon salt

but I discovered, after I'd shopped, that it only makes 9 - 10 balls, and I needed more than that. 

Luckily, I'd also picked up a bag of Andes mint chocolate chips, and had bought a pint of cream, so I used: 

1 bag (10.5 oz, I think) of milk chocolate chips

1 bag (11 oz, I think) of Andes mint chocolate chips

1 pint heavy cream

2 tablespoons sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

Mix everything up in a microwave safe bowl, and heat a minute at a time, stirring well in between. Just like the recipe said, it magically all came together when it didn't look melted at all. I whisked it a bit to get it all smooth. That's the whisk from my immersion blender that you see in the photo, but I did it by hand. If Peeper had not been sleeping, I probably would have used the blender.

Stick the bowl in the fridge for a while until it's thick and scoopable, then make quarter-cup (or so) plops, and put it in the freezer. This is not the most attractive stage of the recipe.

When they are firmish, make them into balls. First, I used my bare hands to make the balls, and picked them up to wrap in plastic, but that was a big mess.

Then I just used a spatula to scoop it onto a piece of plastic wrap in my hand, and then use that to make it into a ball and wrap it up.

Keep them frozen until you're ready to use, then put in a mug, one ball to about a cup of milk, and pop it in the microwave for a couple of minutes. Yummmmmm.

The next thing I made was also a Pinterest recipe - chocolate peppermint dipped marshmallows, which I found here and here.

I used just a packaged meltable chocolate candy . . .

. . . and regular old peppermints, crushed up in the blender. (They got a lot more crushed than this.)

For the sticks, I used some really small-diameter chocolate-dipped peppermint sticks that I found at Aldi. I just snipped the wrappers open and stuck out enough to go into the marshmallow. Then I dipped them in the chocolate and rolled them in the peppermint.

I make it sound easy, but there was quite a bit of experimentation with the dipping and drying set up. This seemed like a good idea, but didn't work at all.

 

Shrike convinced me that it would be fine to just put them down on the marshmallows, and that worked great. Thanks, honey!

If you look at the one in the foreground of this photo, you'll see that I had a small problem with the wrappers, in that there's now about an inch sticking out. So, I took each one off, snipped off about an inch or so from the open end, and stuck it back on.

Then I wrapped the marshmallow in plastic and tied it all with a ribbon.

These were delicious, if I do say so myself. The concept is that you would stick one in a cup of hot chocolate, but I've been making that minty anyway (First with the truffles, then with a bit of peppermint schnapps. What?) so I've just been eating them.

Peeper likes them, too. When I was working on the other things, I let her have one of the not-so-pretty ones. She and Shrike were in the other room while she was eating it, but I kept hearing her say "Thank you, Mama! Thank you, Mama!"

I asked Shrike, "Why does she keep thanking me?" and she said that "She's saying 'thank you' every time she takes a bit of it!"

The last things I made were chocolate and vanilla dipped pretzels, with crushed peppermint sprinkled on them. I've never made them before, but they were pretty straight forward. Dip, sprinkle, chill, done.

After I'd used up all the whole pretzels and all the peppermint, I spread the pretzel pieces on a pan and drizzled the rest of both candies onto them.

The gift bags each included a bag with some of each kind of pretzel, a bag of pretzel / M&M treats, four marshmallow pops, and four hot chocolate balls.

I took big pretzels and pretzel M&M treats to the cookie exchange. I really should have photographed them before I put on the plastic wrap, but I wasn't about to try to take it off and rewrap it.