Thursday, December 3, 2009

Making Holiday Gifts From The Kitchen

I have spent 2 days now trying to make candies, and other fun things for Christmas to add to the baskets I will be giving this year.

I had an attempt at Caramel candied made with honey... sadly, they turned into a very thick caramel cream. Perfect for ice cream or to make caramel apples... not to individually wrap, as my intent was. So I ended up jarring the Caramel cream which will refridgerate well, so I will give the jars as gifts.

I decided to use some of the caramel for my next project. I made some brownies, which are still cooling now. They are Mocha Cocoa, topped with some of the caramel and sprinkled with Toffee I put in the food processor. Lets just say they are indulgunt! I'll be cutting them in round brownies with a cookie cutter and will individually wrap each one for baskets. I'll freeze them until I make the baskets.

The one thing that went COMPLETELY right, and were easy and FABULOUS were some Chocolate Covered Pretzels I sprinkled with toffee as well. They went so well, I'm going to do even more and crush up some candy canes to sprinkle the next batch with.

Here's the recipe and photo:

Toffee Sprinkled Chocolate Cover Sour Dough Pretzels-

melt 11.5 oz bag of chocolate chips w/
1 Tbsp Crisco shortening (not the flavored)
Over a double boiler

Dip your pretzels and place them on wax paper to go in the fridge.
I put some toffee candies in the food processor and then sprinkled that over the pretzels for I put them in the fridge to cool.

You can individually wrap these, or I stacked them with wax paper in between and put into a plastic bag with ribbon to add to my gift baskets.


3 comments:

  1. Yummy... Happy Holiday Baking

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  2. Biscotti Queen, I have had success with cream caramels made with honey. Honey is such a strong flavor that in a recipe like cream caramels, where all the other flavors are mild, a little goes a long way. If your recipe calls for a cup of light corn syrup and 2 cups of sugar, substitute 1/4 c honey for 1/4 c of the corn syrup and you'll have a nice honey flavor. I've found that if I go much more than that, I end up with a honey flavor that is overpowering.

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  3. Forgot to mention before when I was here reading, that these look really good. I make chocolate covered pretzels quite often and I love toffee, now why didn't I think of combining the two?

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