More pretzels, Valentine's Hearts, Recipes.

So I made more pretzels today, with all white flour instead of half whole wheat. I am much more happier with these!

The small bowl has my improvised Honey Mustard Sauce, which is made by putting a dollop of mayo, some mustard, and some honey in a bowl and stirring. I didn't measure at ALL so there's how to make that. It's freaking delicious. 

I made more of these peanut butter filled beauties, and I LOVE them. The mold is made for making chocolate candy in, so they just pop straight out after you put them in the freezer for a bit. 

Half done-ish. 

Now. I am not one for measuring things like peanut butter. It's too sticky to deal with. So, to make the peanut butter filling in these, I just take half a stick of butter, and about the top 1/3 of a small container of creamy Jif, and put those in a bowl. Microwave 30 seconds. Mix. Add a BIT of vanilla, then add a pile of powdered sugar. Mix. Just taste it to see if you want more sugar. Jif already has sugar, so you don't really need that much. If it tastes sweet, you're good. And THAT is how you make "Reeses" peanut butter! That's actually more or less my recipe to make peanut butter fudge, actually. But. It works! 

Then you just melt the meltable chocolate in the microwave, use a spoon to more or less cover the inside of the mold, freeze for a few minutes until solid, pour some peanut butter off of a spoon into there, freeze, then cover with chocolate, freeze, presto, homemade reeses! 

For the pretzels, I have an actual recipe. Here: 

One packet of yeast (2 and 1/4 teaspoons)

1.5 cups of warm water

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt

4 cups all purpose flour

2 tablespoons baking soda

1 cup hot water

Put yeast in WARM water, mix until mostly dissolved. Add suagr and salt, mix. Add flour. Mix. Add more flour until the dough isn't sticky... 

Flour surface and knead the dough for a bit until when you poke it it will poof back up magically. Shape into ball. Cut into 1/3 cup sizes, I just hack a piece off and stick it in a 1/3 cup to see if it fits. 

Take the baking soda and dump it in hot water, mix until... You get sick of mixing, unless you actually manage to dissolve it all. 

Roll pieces into ropes about 20 inches long. Shape into pretzel shape. Dip into baking soda water then place on cookie sheet. Salt on top, or whatever you want... 

Bake at 425F degrees for 15 minutes, done! NOM NOM NOM TIME. 

Okay, so this is based off of a recipe called pretzels in 30 minutes or something like that and this takes me like an hour to do all by myself. The dough does not want to form ropes. The woman talked about her husband helping her, so if you can manage to do this in a half hour with some help, kudos. If you manage to do that by yourself, give me your life force. I mean, even more kudos! Yeah. 

It's more fun to listen to music while you're cursing at the dough. 

Anyways. The first time, I used 2 cups cake flour (didn't have regular) and 2 cups whole wheat, and dipped it in an egg. I broiled for the last 5 minutes of baking them in order to get them to brown, and they tasted more like bread than a pretzel. This time, I read several more recipes and read someone talking about how they used to make pretzels with some kind of disgusting thing (I can't remember) in order to make them taste like pretzels but now we do it in baking soda and I have to say, they taste a lot more like pretzels this time. They kind of have crunchy crusts, but the inside is still super soft. 

Now, my dad is on a diet and took my recipe and figured out the nutritional value to see if he could have one. Well, here's that info, based on the fact that I made 11 pretzels this time. 

Calories: 174

Fat: 0.5

Carbs: 34.5

Fiber: 1.4

Protein: 4.9

and that is per pretzel. Not the whole batch. I can only assume the measurements are in grams, since that is what is usually on packages.