Sweet Treats

For Christmas I always give my students something to celebrate the season.  For many years I would buy little gifts until one day a student and her family made cookies for me.  There made all kinds of flavors and I absolutely loved them!  And then I thought about how they took the time to make them and my student shared how much fun she had decorating them.

Well... that was several years back now.  But I never forgot the warm, happy feeling I experienced by getting a present someone had taken the time to actually make with their own hands.  And so I began making sweet treats for my students ever since and they love it!  For some of them it is the only time of the year, outside of their birthday, when they are allowed to indulge in something with sugar.

So I thought it would be fun to share in this post what I gave my students this past year.

The cookies I made were two kinds:  sugar cookies with M&Ms and peanut butter cookies with Hershey's chocolate kisses.  These have been favorites for all my students.

You can either make your own cookie dough or use the kind already mixed in the bag at your local grocery.  Then you simply bake and place the desired candies on the cookies.  Simple. :)

Just be certain not to put any Hershey kisses or M&Ms in the oven with the cookie dough.  That doesn't turn out good.

Next I decided to include chocolate covered pretzel sticks with sprinkles.  This was a new thing for me but it was really easy.  

1.  You need to use chocolate, white or dark, that can be heated.  So no breaking up a chocolate bar and trying to melt it.  You'll just end up with burnt broken up chocolate bar.  In my case I decided to use chocolate melts.  Basically they look like flat chips of chocolate.

You can find these at craft stores in the baking section.  They will be with many other colors and flavors.  Mmmm. Yummy!

2.  Next you should take a microwaveable bowl and place ten to fifteen melts in.  It is recommended that you warm them up in ten second intervals to avoid burning.  I usually put them in for about twenty seconds.

3.  Then you stir until all the melts are nice and gooey. 

4.  Now you can take a paper plate and pour the amount and color of sprinkles you want to use.

5.  While the melts are still hot place the tip of a pretzel stick into the chocolate and swirl.  Once you have an amount you are satisfied with quickly roll the chocolate tip into the sprinkles and swirl again.  You can also hold the pretzel stick above the plate and drop sprinkles on.

6.  Then you have to place the pretzel sticks in an upright position so that everything can harden.  I placed mine in plastic cups and then let them sit overnight in the fridge.

The final treat I included were cupcakes.  But not just any cupcakes.  Mine were decorated with snowmen.  I couldn't find any blue icing and I thought that white icing would be redundant so I went with green.  Oh well.  Maybe next year.

Anyhow here is a quick tutorial on how to make the snowmen.

1.  You will need mini marshmallows, round sprinkles, icing, and red candy melts.

 2.  Okay.  What I did was make the heads first.  I chose two dark sprinkles for the eyes and one orange sprinkle for the nose.

3.  Next I simply pressed the sprinkles into the spot I wanted them to be for the snowmen faces. Aren't they cute?

4.  Then I placed a little-bit of icing on the bottom of the head and pressed them to the marshmallow that would be the body.

 

5.  Next I placed them strategically on their respective cupcakes and squeezed candy melts over their necklines to create red bow ties.  And I let them sit overnight in the fridge.

So once all the sweets were set and ready it was time to package them.  This was fun too.  As you can see by my photos below.

 

Of course the best part was that I had to try at least one of each treat I gave.  I mean, I had to be sure they tasted good, right?  :)  

" He fills my life with good things.  My youth is renewed like the eagle's!"

Psalm 103: 5