M&M pretzels

After my oven debacle on Super Bowl Sunday, I had to come up with a recipe on the fly that I could make quickly and easily (and without the use of an oven) for the Super Bowl party we were headed to.

Mike offered to run up to the grocery store to get me whatever I needed, bless his heart. Three ingredients are all this old standby requires. They are fast, easy, and they are always a huge crowd pleaser. One former co-worker once nicknamed them "crack." And although I like to tell people that they're great because they're small (therefore not too sinful), I also know it's hard, if not impossible, to eat just one.

Ingredients

Mini pretzel knots
White chocolate (I use the same baking bark coating stuff when I make the mini chocolate covered pretzel sticks)
Plain M&Ms

Directions

Melt the chocolate in a microwave (one bar at a time), being careful not to overheat it and burn it. Lay the pretzels out flat on wax paper. Drizzle a spoonful of chocolate onto each pretzel. Before the chocolate sets, push 2 M&Ms into each pretzel.


These are great because you can do them with regular colored M&Ms for a birthday or "just because," and it's a colorful treat. Or you can get the holiday M&Ms at Christmas time for a quick, festive addition to your snack platters. I've even been known to buy a bag or two of regular M&Ms and pick out the red and blue ones for the fourth of July and orange and brown for Halloween.

Since Valentine's Day was fast approaching, I opted for the fun pink and red bag.

Aren't they adorable?


And Mike wasn't just running around, helping me. He was also whipping up his own awesome treat for the game: jalapeno poppers. Uh, yum!

Some throwbacks and a requiem

I haven't posted in several days, but that doesn't mean I haven't been baking! I just haven't made anything "new," per se.

At work, we had a chili cookoff last week. We had 17 different pots of chili. That's a LOT of chili. I thought my co-workers might need something sweet after all that meat and spice, so I brought in Schmoopie Pies. They were gone very quickly, so I think it was a good choice.

I also made some Blueberry Muffins last week just because I felt like baking, and they sounded good. I'd forgotten how yummy that crumb topping is. This recipe is a great standard blueberry muffin recipe to keep around.

But over the weekend, something horrible happened. I was attempting to make these yummy Chocolate Chip Cake Bars to take to a Super Bowl party, and my oven officially went on the fritz. I am well acquainted with how long my oven usually takes to bake things, and these just kept getting browner and browner on the outside, yet refused to bake on the inside. This also happened when I tried to make some Classic Brownies a week or two ago. I tried to give my poor, old oven the benefit of the doubt after the brownie debacle. Maybe the brownies were a fluke, I thought. Maybe I didn't mix something properly.

But, alas. It wasn't me. It wasn't the brownies. My oven simply can't work hard enough to bake through a whole batch of bars/brownies/cakes anymore.

On the one hand, it's good. We've really needed a new oven for a while. I just have a hard time parting with appliances until they really and truly bite the dust. This little oven kept chugging along, so who was I to decide she was too old to do the job?

Plus, we can get a WHITE one, so it will finally match our refrigerator and dishwasher. How modern of us.

But still. I'm sort of sad. This oven has given me countless hours of great service. It has baked desserts for soldiers, work potlucks, holidays, and birthdays, as well as endless "just because" sweets.

It will be hard to say goodbye.

By the way: I couldn't go to my Super Bowl party without something sweet in tow, so I did improvise. Check back for a future post on that.