M&M Kiss Pretzels

I have officially begun whipping up my menu of Christmas treats.  Last year's holiday baking & candy making ordeal took me an entire week of late nights and a 14-hour day on Christmas Eve in order to get everything prepared to pass out to our families.  In total I believe I spent just about 40 hours in the kitchen or at the table working on all of the various goodies.

This year I am determined to get everything finished before the hubby even gets home for leave, which means over the next several days I will find myself in the kitchen.  Fortunately I have decided to do a lot less this year, and plan on doing much less candy making and more cookie baking, which means the whole process will be a lot less time consuming too.

After seeing these treats pop up on Pinterest, I decided to give them a try.  They're super simple to make, with the most tedious thing in the entire process being to unwrap all of the Hershey's Kisses.

You simply line a cookie sheet with some parchment paper, and then arrange a bunch of pretzels on it all lined up to be topped with your choice of Kisses.  I decided to go with half of the regular milk chocolate ones, and then half with the white & milk chocolate Hugs variety.

I simply preheated my oven to 200 degrees, and then placed each tray in the oven for just a few minutes.  The cookie sheet with the regular Kisses baked for about 5 minutes, and then the sheet with the Hugs baked for about 3.5-4 minutes (white chocolate melts faster so they didn't take as long).  Then once they're out of the oven, you very quickly just go through and top each with an M&M, pressing the candy into the Kiss.

I found that my white chocolate kisses were a little more melted than the regular milk chocolate ones, even with the shorter baking time, so the chocolate spread out a lot more when the M&M's were added, but I find that I actually like the look of them a little bit better after all was said and done and they firmed up in the fridge.  Next up: Italian Rainbow Cookies!