Valentines for Friends

Now I know February is over and I know that this treat doesn't really require a recipe.  BUT the responses and questions Helena & I have gotten from our valentines make a blog post necessary.

If you haven't had pretzels dipped in almond bark, then you should make some.  They're delicious.  My sister & I usually make them at Christmas time, and I've always figured everyone has had them.  But that is obviously not the case, since 6 out 8 friends that we gave them to, later asked me how to make them.  That's a lot of people who have not had them, thus this blog post.

They're super simple to make, but to find the ingredients turned out to be a bit tougher than I thought.  The almond bark we always buy for Christmas (see below) seems to be impossible to buy up here.

I went to 4 grocery stores and Bulk Barn, and none of them had it.  At Bulk Barn they did have almond bark with almonds in it, however.  We ended up making them with 4 different melted foods - almond bark with the almonds taken out of it, white chocolate, white candy melts, and strawberry bark.  The white candy melts worked best.

All you do is melt the dipping substance, dip the pretzels in (as much or as little as you want), lay them out to cool on wax paper, and then decorate.  It was a great activity for Helena and me to do together, as she loved adding sprinkles.  After they cooled, she then sorted them by decoration into different containers - something she had lots of fun with, especially as many ended up in her mouth!

We then made up Ziploc bags which contained half plain pretzels and half decorated pretzels.  While you always want to eat one of the treat pretzels, having a good mixture of salty and sweet kept them from being too much, although maybe that's a bad thing as these are quite addictive!