Pretzel Rolls

Somehow I got it into my head that I wanted to make pretzel rolls. Probably it was a combination of Pinterest (because where else would I get any idea?) and Costco (their pretzel rolls are delicious). Anyway, I went in search of an easy recipe, and I found the perfect one at Caramel Moments. It is such a great recipe, that when I took these rolls out of the oven, I said "Holy Cow, I can't believe these turned out so great!"

I mean, check them out!

Pretty great, right?! 

I followed Caramel Moment's recipe pretty closely, but I have a few tricks for you if you are going to make them. 

1. I used my pizza cutter to divide the dough into 12 pieces...worked like a charm! 

2. I used my whoopie pie pan to bake the rolls. It was the exact right size!

So if Pinterest and Costco are making you crave pretzel rolls, head on over to Caramel Moments for the recipe, and hopefully yours will turn out amazing too!

Creepy Carrots!

We just had the best author visit from Aaron Reynolds at my school! I mean, look at how much fun we are having...and that's just the staff, not to mention how much the kids LOVED it!

We decorated the school with characters from his books, and it turned out great!

But the best part, of course, was the treats! One of our favorite books of his is Creepy Carrots, where a greedy rabbit thinks he is being followed by the carrots he snacks on, so we created a cake and some cake pops to go with the book. I think they turned out pretty amazing!

Watch out for the creepy carrots! Tunk...tunk...tunk...

Valentine Cookies

I don't know if you all know this, but teachers get a lot of Valentine candy. And most of the time, most of my Valentine candy gets given away or sits on the counter until long after Valentine's day is past. So this year, I was inspired by a friend who melted all of her candy down and made chocolate covered strawberries. I wasn't quite that ambitious, but I did gather up all of my candy and chop it up into little pieces. I used all of it, except for the ones that were a weird color pink in the middle - those got thrown in the trash.

I chopped it all up, and then threw it into my cookie dough. When I took the cookies out of the oven, I realized this might not have been the best idea...

These are definitely not the most beautiful cookies ever. Turns out, using the chocolates with caramel in the middle was not the best idea I've ever had. When the caramel melted, it stuck to the cookie sheet and made the cookies really hard to get off the pan. I will also say that cheap Valentine chocolate still tastes like cheap Valentine chocolate, even when it's disguised as chocolate chip cookies. Of course, it's not stopping me from eating them, but maybe next year I'll try chocolate covered strawberries...