We used bright white, red, and blue chips to drizzle over the top of the pretzels.
We just may need to treat ourselves to a strawberry daiquiri at P.J.'s sometime this week!
Saturday, August 18, 2018
That's what friends are for ...
Yesterday, my friend Deb asked me to help her make some food for her grandson J.J.'s first birthday party this afternoon. So we ran to A.C. Moore to pick up some different colored chocolate chips to melt for making chocolate covered pretzel sticks ...
We used bright white, red, and blue chips to drizzle over the top of the pretzels.
We also went to the grocery store to get some ingredients to make a chex mix and sloppy joes. J.J. was going to spend the night so she bought him a cute little stuffed race car to play with while we worked outside in the kitchen all evening. I melted the chocolate chips while she dipped and drizzled.
We used bright white, red, and blue chips to drizzle over the top of the pretzels.
Those chocolate covered pretzels look delicious. Enjoy the party.
ReplyDeleteA cute treat for the party. I love choc. dipped pretzel.
ReplyDeleteHow nice for all of you to share time together preparing a great celebration for J.J.
ReplyDeleteHappy First Birthday J.J. 🎈🎁🎆🎂
Looks so yummy!!! Happy Birthday J.J!!!
ReplyDeleteSlurp! Also, your posts are always a reason for learning something new. There is a very old pretzel tradition in Pennsylvania according to Wiki...
ReplyDeletePennsylvania
In particular, the S-shaped soft pretzel, often served with brown mustard, became iconic in Philadelphia and was established as a part of Philadelphia's cuisine for snacking at school, work, or home, and considered by most to be a quick meal. The average Philadelphian today consumes about twelve times as many pretzels as the national average.[40] Pennsylvania is the center of American pretzel production for both the hard-crispy and the soft-bread types of pretzels.[37] Southeastern Pennsylvania, with its large population of German background, is considered the birthplace of the American pretzel industry, and many pretzel bakers are still located in the area. Pennsylvania produces 80% of the nation's pretzels.[41]
The annual United States pretzel industry is worth over $550 million.[42] The average American consumes about 1.5 pounds (0.7 kg) of pretzels per year.[43] The privately run "Pretzel Museum" opened in Philadelphia in 1993.[37] In 2003, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell declared April 26 "National Pretzel Day" to acknowledge the importance of the pretzel to the state's history and economy.[44] Philly Pretzel Factory stores offer a free pretzel to each customer on this day.[45]
Hard pretzels originated in the United States, where, in 1850, the Sturgis bakery in Lititz, Pennsylvania, became the first commercial hard pretzel bakery. Snack food hard pretzels were shaped as sticks (around 3 millimetres (0.12 in) thick and 12 centimetres (4.7 in) long), loops, braids, letters or little pretzels; they have become a popular snack in many countries around the world. A thicker variety of sticks can be 1 centimetre (0.39 in) thick; in the U. S. these are called Bavarian pretzels. Unlike the soft pretzels, these were durable when kept in an airtight environment and marketable in a variety of convenience stores. Large-scale production began in the first half of the 1900s, more so during 1930 to 1950. A prime example was in 1949, when highly innovative American Machine and Foundry Co., of New York City, developed the "pretzel bender": a new automatic crispy-styled baked pretzel-twisting machine that rolled and tied them at the rate of 50 a minute—more than twice as fast as skilled hand twisters could make them—and conveyed them through the baking and salting process.[46]
In Europe, snack-food pretzels are usually sprinkled with salt, but also with sesame seed, poppy seed, or cheese. In the U.S., they come in many varieties of flavors and coatings, such as yogurt, chocolate, strawberry, mustard, cheese and others, and chocolate-covered hard pretzels are popular around Christmas time and given as gifts. The variety of shapes and sizes became contest of imagination in the marketing of the pretzels taste. During the 1900s, people in Philadelphia would use the small slender pretzel stick as a common accompaniment to ice cream or would crumble pretzels as a topping. This combination of cold sweet and salty taste was very popular for many years. Eventually, this led to the development of an ice cream cone tasting like a pretzel. More recently Mars, Incorporated manufactures M&M's with a small spherical pretzel covered in milk chocolate and candy coated in all of the standard M&M's colors, called "Pretzel M&M's". Soft pretzels are frequently sold in shopping malls, with notable chains including Auntie Anne's and Pretzelmaker/Pretzel Time.