Pretzel chocolate m&m thingys

I've eaten these before and always wondered how they were made. Oh my, this is the EASIEST treat to make! I found the tutorial on Pinterest (of course!) at this blog. But I'll tell you what we did too.

The treat is just round pretzels, Hershey kisses and M&Ms. Preheat the oven to 225 degrees. Spread out the pretzels on a cookie sheet. Then unwrap a ton of Hershey kisses to go inside the pretzels. Even M could help with this treat!

Once you have all the pretzels filled, put them in the oven for 3-4 minutes. It really doesn't take long to melt the kisses. The darker ones in this picture are dark chocolate because we ran out of milk chocolate. They stuck to the cookie sheet and broke the pretzel when I tried to get them off. We'll stick to milk chocolate from now on.

Once the kisses have melted enough to smash down, place one M&M in each pretzel and squish it around so the chocolate touches all the sides of the pretzel. Let them set up or you can put them in the fridge if you are really impatient. We put them in the fridge. :)

Two excited boys!

We have no idea what to call them. My husband suggested "pretzel chocolate M&M thingys". I suggested "pretzel treat". I think we should just call them yummy!

Christmas Puppets

Today the activity in the train was to make Christmas puppets. Last year, I bought this foam stick puppet kit from Michaels (one of my favorite stores) and we made some puppets out of it. I brought it out again this year, and the boys didn't even remember. hehe. We each made 2 (1 for each hand, of course). M made a reindeer and snowman, J made Santa and a reindeer, and I made Santa and a penguin. And there's enough left to make them again next year. Now that's thrifty!

Reindeer Sugar Cookies

So, because of my obsession with Pinterest, (I tell you, I'm seriously obsessed) I have decided to do one idea I find from the site every day and blog about it. Hopefully I'll be able to do that with the chaos that is raising two little boys! But, if I don't do it, it will never get done, and these are good ideas I do want to try. And so, on to today's project.

Reindeer Sugar Cookies! This is the blog where I found the idea from on Pinterest. Gotta give credit where credit's due.

Last year, I started a train advent "calendar". It counts down to December 25 (the 25 is on the other side, I'll take a picture another day) and every day there is either a Hershey kiss or something fun to do. Of course the boys always wish for the chocolate, but that's only like 5 days. Today's event was to make cookies. Just as good as chocolate, in my opinion.

Big brother "J" can't (he always says "I can't like it" instead of "I don't like it", which we think is funny) like peanut butter, so I decided to make sugar cookies instead. While little brother "M" took a nap, J and I used this recipe from Allrecipes.com (another favorite site) to make the cookies. He helped me mix the dry ingredients and roll the dough into balls.

 Right out of the oven, we put on the reindeer faces. I used a box of Nabisco 100 calorie pack chocolate covered pretzels (mainly because that's all I could find, not because I wanted diet pretzels, though does that make them healthier? hehe), red M&Ms for the noses, and mini chocolate chips for the eyes. I think the eyes are kinda small, so we could have used regular chips. The idea blog says to use mini M&Ms, but I couldn't find any at the store.

 

(ug, I need to try that sheet pan cleaner idea I found on Pinterest!)

I think they look pretty good for baking with a 4 year old! And J learned a valuable lesson about hot cookie sheets. Luckily, it wasn't serious. :-)

Merry Christmas!
~Mavis

Cranberry Christmas Tree

It's been awhile since my last blog post, but I'm determined to start blogging again! With my new found obession with Pinterest, I have an abundance of crafts to make and ideas to try. Hopefully blogging about it will keep me motivated to actually do them!

At Thanksgiving, I tried making cranberry sauce from scratch. (It didn't turn out so well. It was super tart and needed more sugar.) We also put cranberries in the stuffing (which we also didn't like-good thing the new sweet potato casserole was delicious!), so I had half a package of fresh cranberries left. Since the cranberry experiments at Thanksgiving were such a bust, I decided to decorate with the remaining cranberries instead of cooking them.

I bought a craft foam cone at Meijer for $2.99 and already had the hot glue. It took me about a hour to make while I watched the boys play in the basement.

I found a felt star in some of my scrapbooking supplies and hot glued it to the top. And wa-la: a cranberry Christmas tree!

Since I have decided to make my blog public, there won't be too many pictures of the boys, but I had to add this one from our trip to see Santa last week. It was a successful picture! Don't be surprised if you see it again. :) We visited Santa at Bass Pro Shop. It's a free picture and a great store to browse in!