My Kind of Holiday Baking

I found this great recipe for Pretzel Hugs. It's super easy and the kids loved making and eating them! We made about 300 of these for teacher gifts and for refreshments for the Christmas Piano Recital we had on Saturday. The rest of them we packaged up to give out to friends and family.

Pretzel Hugs Recipe

(from Becky Higgins)

Ingredients:

pretzels (I think the square waffle type pretzels are best)
hugs
plain M&Ms

Directions:

Place the pretzels on a parchment lined baking sheet, and place one (unwrapped) hug in the middle of each pretzel.


Bake at 200 degrees, until hugs get shiny and start to look a little melted - about 5 minutes.

Remove from oven and put an M&M in the middle of each hug. Press down a little. Cool in the freezer for 15 minutes, or on the counter for a few hours until set.

Enjoy!


Here are some tips you might want to consider... (trust me, I learned these the hard way)

You can use kisses instead of hugs, but they don't melt at the same rate, so you'll need to do them on separate baking trays. I think the hugs taste better and they melt faster too.

You definitely need the parchment paper, or you'll be scraping them off your pan.

Don't wait until they actually look melted to take them out of the oven, or they will be too runny.

If you want red and green ones, try to find the Christmas M&M's. I looked in four stores and couldn't find them, so I ended up buying the regular ones. Now we're stuck with a huge tin of blue, yellow, orange, and brown M&M's.

(You should have seen Samantha making sure that nobody laid a finger on the red and green ones when we were making them.... Just picture the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.)