Look At What I Made!

I love to putter around on Pinterest when I'm bored.  Lately there have been a whole bunch of recipes for edible Eastery birds nests floating around, and that inspired me to make the following.

 (Photo courtesy of my brother, Patrick, who also emailed it to me after I thought I had sent it to myself and then apparently lost my train of thought and wandered off without ever hitting "send."  He's awesome.)

The original recipe I found here actually used lo mein noodles and melted marshmallows.  Apparently it tastes better than it sounds, because similar recipes are all over the web, but I had a feeling that wasn't going to fly with my family.  When I originally saw the picture I thought it was of pretzels covered in chocolate, so I figured I might as well try that instead.

As a disclaimer: I had no experience melting chocolate.  I used chocolate chips and melted them in the microwave.  I'm sure that breaks most of the chocolate melting commandments, but my kids will only amuse themselves for so long, so time was of the essence.  I'm sure it works much better if you use chocolate that's meant for melting for lollipops, and melt it over the stove.  So if you are a chocolate melting expert and spend the next 2 minutes reading my blog and slamming your head into the keyboard because I did this all wrong, I warned you.

Basically, I poured a quarter of the bag of chocolate chips in a bowl and microwaved it for 30 second increments, stirring it in between, until it was smooth.  If it starts to get grainy, adding a little butter seemed to help a bit.  (As you can see in the picture, there was a batch I had trouble with.)  Then I took little pretzel sticks, broke them into quarters, and threw them in the bowl of melted chocolate.  I mixed it up with my hands and then put handfuls of chocolate covered pretzels into muffin tins that I'd sprayed with Pam.  (You can try spraying your hands with Pam too, but it didn't help me much.  Eh, some recipes are just messy.)  Then I popped the whole thing in the freezer for an hour or two.  You could probably take it out sooner, I just had other things to do.  Then I melted a few more chocolate chips to use as glue to attach the "bird eggs."

The verdict?  Well, it's difficult to go wrong with chocolate covered pretzels, as far as taste goes.  Unfortunately they don't bend the way noodles do, so you run the risk of your nests looking less like nests and more like animal droppings.  (Especially if you run out of room in your muffin tins and start free-forming nests on a cookie sheet.  It will work, but they can look kind of funky.)  If I made it again, I'd do it with the chocolate specifically made for melting instead of the chips.  Still, it was fun, and the ones that came out well looked really cute.