Patriotic Pretzels

This is not an original recipe at all, but I wanted to include it anyway. You can find all kinds of versions with just a quick google search. I went for simple and easy.

My daughter really wanted to make a dessert for the 4th of July. She was really wanting to make cupcakes (she just got a new cupcake book she is itching to use). However, since I made a cake last night (recipe coming this week), I convinced her try something different.

We were inspired by my friend Carol, who made some yummy Revolutionary Berries and blogged about it. I started thinking of pretzels students have made me for Christmas and decided we would just put a patriotic twist on it. It was an easy recipe, and my daughter enjoyed decorating the sticks.

Ingredients:
Pretzel rods (the biggest pretzel sticks you can find)
1 12 oz. bag of white chocolate chips (I am thinking almond bark would be good, and I use canned frosting with my students on a similar activity on Constitution Day)
red, white, blue sprinkles and sugars

Directions:
Melt the chocolate chips in the microwave. We followed the directions on the bag. We "cooked" at 70 percent power for a minute, stirred it, then added about 10 more seconds at the reduced power, then stirred again. If you cook it too long, it will get hard really quick. Chocolate is tricky that way. Oh, I just melted mine in a large measuring cup.

Dip the pretzel sticks into the melted chocolate, rolling it to cover about half (or more) of the stick. That was tough. I just had to keep tilting the measuring cup to the side to cover the pretzel as much as I could.

We put wax paper down and then poured the sprinkles on top. That way, my daughter could just roll the pretzel stick in the sprinkles of her choice. It was much easier for clean up too.

Give them just a few minutes, then they are hard and ready to eat.

Yum!

I think we will have to make these for every holiday, changing the sprinkles each time of course...

Happy cooking!
Reba