Chocolate Pretzel Christmas Trees

These chocolate pretzel Christmas trees are so cute, and the best part is that they took less than half an hour to make!  Time is pretty precious at this time of year, so if I’m going to be making something it had better be 1) cute, 2) fast, and 3) delicious… and these were all three!  I made a few pretzel and chocolate treats for Halloween (here and here) and they were delicious!  So when I came across this idea from Oh My Creative, I knew I had to give them a try!

The ingredients are pretty simple:  green Merkens chocolate wafers, pretzel rods and something to decorate the trees with.  Quantities will depend on how many you plan on making, but the amounts shown in the photo below are all I used to make about 5 or 6.  It was around one cup of green chocolate wafers (which you are best off getting from the bulk store.)

I found these super cute little snowflake sprinkles from the bulk store too.  You can use anything you want to decorate your trees, but I thought these were adorable!

Start by arranging the pretzel rods on a baking sheet lined with a Silpat (or waxed paper is fine too).  The Silpat makes it super easy to peal the chocolate off once it hardens.

The other times I’ve worked with Merckens wafers I have melted them in the micowave, which definitely works really well.  But when I made my pretzel spider web treats, transferring the chocolate from the bowl to the zip lock bag was a bit of a challenge.  So this time I melted the chocolate in hot water.  I placed the Merken’s in a ziploc bag, put the bag in another bag just in case there were any leaks, and then put it in a bowl of hot water until they were melted.

It took about 10 minutes and I changed the water a couple times to keep the temperature up, but at least I got to skip the messy step of filling a zip lock bag with melted chocolate.

Cut a small hole in the corner of the ziploc bag (again, similar to what I did for the pretzel spider web treats) to make your own piping bag.

I recommend starting at the bottom of the tree and working your way up.  If you start at the bottom, it’s easier to fix your mistakes as you get used to the speed of the chocolate coming out of the bag.  (It comes out fast!).

Gently squeeze out the chocolate into the shape of a tree as you work your way up the pretzel rod.

Sprinkle some multi-coloured sprinkles on the trees to decorate:

Then top with the snowflake sprinkles, or M&M’s or anything festive that you want!

Aren’t they cute?  My girls were so excited to eat them!

I think if I were to make them again, I’d cut the hole in the bag a little bit smaller so there was less chocolate on each one.  It would also make it easier to control as the chocolate comes out of the bag.

They harden really quickly.  The chocolate on mine was already setting by the time I was finishing up with the snowflakes.  I let them set another 10 minutes on top of that before I pealed them off and set them out on plates.

They are so cute and festive!  I love that you can decorate them any way you like.  They’d be super cute with white or regular chocolate too if you want to stay away from the coloured chocolates.  There are lots of colour and decorating possibilities, don’t you think?

Source : onelittleproject.com
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