For the firemen on Christmas eve… (pretzel twists with chocolate and M&M)

After reading a bunch of peoples traditions on Family Fun from Disney, Valérie and I really liked the “Surprise a Public Servant” one. We had been to the firehouse not long ago (Nov 6) after Nico was really into an episode of a kiddy show on firemen so it seemed like a great fit for us.

So Valérie explained to Nico that normally people get to be with their family on Christmas eve but the firemen we had met not long ago would not be at home because they help people in case of an accident or a fire all the time even on holidays so they need to be at the firehouse to be ready.

I was so free to steal the introduction from Valérie from our mini muffins, since the start of the history is the same.

We wanted to do something that Nico could help us with as well and we found a really easy recipe for pretzel twists with chocolate and M&Ms.

At first we spread out the pretzel twists on the parchment paper, trying to put them as tight as we could to maximize the space, even though Nico did his best to sabotage us by eating away our pretzels while he put them on, I guess he just wanted to make sure that they were good enough to bring to the firemen, so who can really fault him?

Now the plan was to have Nico place the chocolate wafers onto the pretzels, then put them into the oven, have them lightly melt, have him put one M&M on each, let them cool off and be done. Well, so far, so good, unfortunately it seems as if it is almost impossible to find these wafers here, so we had to improvise. We tried to put fudge melts (a President’s Choice product here) onto the pretzels and put them into the oven – they were too small and fell in the holes.  We tried chocolate rosebuds – they would burn instead of melt, so we ended up having to melt the chocolate chips in a water bath (bain-marie technique), mortally wounding our rubber spatula in the process.

Then Val drizzled that onto the pretzels, which turned out to be a lot less interactive, due to the hot chocolate, but we were running out of options.

Nico came back into the picture, though, when it came to putting the M&Ms on top of the still warm and gooey chocolate, since it was for Christmas we chose only the green and red, he abandoned us halfway through (one of his favourite TV shows was on), but he helped with two of the three steps.

We then put them into a little cellophane Christmas-y bag…

and then into a basket with some Christmas-y tissue paper and voila, we had a great presentation for the firemen. His little table is a firehouse and the two chairs that come with it are a fire hydrant and a Dalmatian, so he really is into firemen

The basket on the left are the pretzels, with a little bag of candy canes attached to it. The right basket is the mini muffins. You can see some photos of Nico delivering them in the muffin post

If you do this, we’d LOVE to see a photo of it. Email it to us or post it on our Facebook page. We’d love to do a Facebook album, a Pinterest board and a page of your creations

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