herlongwayhome

You know how right after Thanksgiving you feel like you are ready to kick of the Christmas season? After Thanksgiving dinner, we always watch Christmas Vacation, which feels like a real transition to the second part of the holiday season. That’s kind of how I feel about the Super Bowl. Now that the game is behind us, I’m ready to officially shift in to Valentine’s Day. And I expect everyone to transition with me, since for dessert at our Super Bowl party everyone had these Valentine’s Day caramel chocolate covered pretzels.

Admittedly, I’ve been avoiding the whole chocolate covered pretzel thing for quite literally no reason. I think because I couldn’t wrap my head around the combination of sprinkles that would be pretty? So ridiculous to not make them for such an easy problem to solve – and it really was easy to solve! I just went to Michael’s, picked one set of sprinkles I loved and then used those to pick 4 more variations that I thought all looked cute together.

I think the most labor intensive part about making these pretzels was unwrapping all of the caramel! If you go into the candy aisle, you can grab any bag of wrapped caramels, but just give yourself enough time to unwrap them all. Then you’ll gently melt the caramel until it’s super gooey and line them up on parchment paper while you continue to dip your pretzels in the caramel. A key to a smoother pretzel is to gently roll the pretzel sticks in your hands to smooth out the caramel. I think if you dip 4-5 pretzels and then take a break to roll, you’ll get the best results since the caramel will still be a bit warm and therefore pliable.

While I’ve read that you can use chocolate chips or chocolate bars to dip your pretzels, I opted for melting candies. I felt like they would harden best and not get all melty all over the place. I also love that you can find them in any color you want and I thought the white and pink chocolate melts would work best for the sprinkles I chose. I had a bit of an idea of the chocolate colors I wanted going in to pick out the sprinkles, which I think also helped to imagine how the sprinkles would all look packaged together.

I’ll definitely be working these into the dessert situation when I’m entertaining moving forward. They make a great little thank you gift, if you’re into that kind of thing, plus they give you so much texture on a table!