Mizmun Makes: Pretzel Wands

With October being a thing and me being involved with various activities I am changing my regular post time to be Sunday evenings in the central standard time zone. This will hopefully give me more time to actually dedicate to writing posts when I have days off of work.

This week I decided to try out how well pretzel wands work with a hard candy top versus the more traditional chocolate confection. I got the idea while searching web for food things. I found a cool idea for candy apples that looked very cool (found here) which is basically melting down jolly ranchers and coating an apple with them while mixing in some food safe glitter to make it look amazing. so I thought to myself that looks magical... That kind of magic would be amazing in a wand... maybe one that you could eat... short hair is great... OH! Pretzel Wands! (I was getting my hair cut at the time). Anyway I journeyed forth to find the materials for wand making searching at multiple shops and heroically avoiding children trying to sell me popcorn.

Also this week I used a double boiler for melting candies down. This is a method of heating ingredients that tend to burn or scorch when in a pot that has direct heat applied to it. A double boiler used a lower pot with water in it to boil and produce steam which rises and heats the upper pot/bowl allowing for a much more even raise in temperature making it easier to deal with ingredients that are easily burned.

Pretzel Wands

Not to be used for casting real magic

Ingredients:
Jolly Ranchers (or other hard candies or you can make your own hard candy and flavor/color it as you wish)
Pretzels (I went for the hand sized pretzels as these would be good for kids)

Instructions:
unwrap hard candies and place in a metal mixing bowl or the top of a double boiler pot.
add water to the bottom pot and heat allowing the candies to melt.
dip in pretzels and begin turning while still in the same vertical position as when you dip to retain the candy on the pretzel tip
spin until the outer surface is semi-hardened or hang so that the candy dipped end is above a greased sheet of wax paper and adding candy coating as desired.
allow to harden and enjoy.

Suggestions:
mix different colors or create your own hard candy with cool colors to allow for more distinct wand tips
add food safe glitter for some razzle dazzle to your wand
If you want to get really fancy you could make mini staffs with candy crystals held in place by a different color of hard candy. (I would suggest using rock candy for the center.)
get pop molds that can safely handle heat and fill those with hard candy then use the pretzel as the stick.