Chocolate Covered Pretzels for Valentine’s Day

These chocolate covered pretzels for Valentine’s Day are a cheap and easy gift idea and are a lot more creative than giving paper valentines or a box of store bought chocolates.  These are a great project to make at home with the kids and end up being a fun little edible craft.

Start with a small bowl of red Merckens chocolate:

Melt them in the microwave on ultra low heat (I used setting 3 out of 10) for two minutes at a time until they are completely melted. I just don’t have the patience to use a double boiler for these things!  As long as you use very low heat and don’t leave it unattended, microwaving works just fine!

Take some pretzels and dip them into the chocolate.  You can do about 5 at once, depending on the size of your bowl.

Use a toothpick to pull out a chocolate covered pretzel and place it on either waxed paper or a Silpat.

If you don’t have enough chocolate on the pretzel, add a little more to fill in the holes:

Yes, these heart gummies are left over from last week’s cupid’s arrows project.  This ended up being a really cute way to use them up.  Plus my girls went crazy for the chocolate and gummy combination.

Since these particular hearts came in red and white, I used both colours to make contrasting chocolates:

Place the heart gummy on the chocolate before it hardens:

Leave them on the tray for at least 20 minutes to allow the chocolate to set.  I don’t particularly recommend putting them in the fridge to speed up the process.  I’ve done it before, and when you take the chocolate out of the fridge it sweats, and gets white marks on it.  If you let it harden on the counter, the chocolate ends up looking much cleaner.

I always use my Silpat for these things because the chocolate comes off really easily.  Plus I’m not throwing a sheet of waxed paper into the garbage.  It just feels wasteful when the Silpat is such a good option.

I decided to match the white gummy hearts with the red merckens chocolates and the red gummy hearts with regular milk chocolate.  Of course you can use whatever combination you like.  Throwing some white chocolate in there would have been nice as well.

I’m a pretty huge fan of chocolate covered pretzels.  They are the EASIEST festive treat you can make and you can pretty much customize them for any occasion.  My chocolate covered pumpkin pretzels and pretzel Christmas trees are perfect examples.

These take about 20 minutes to make (and another 20 minutes to set) and they make a super fun treat for your kids.  If your kids are a little older, they would probably love to help out with the process too!  Give these to your sweet heart on Valentine’s Day, make them as a special snack for your kids, or take them to school for a class party.  They’ll be sure to get you into the Valentine’s Day spirit!

Source : onelittleproject.com
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