Pretzels and Smoothies!

Oh how I love to bake. NOT! and the last attempt at baking was interesting. Two loaves, same recipe, same oven, same time. One was somewhat perfect. The other inedible. and so goes the history of my baking. Hit or miss. Mostly miss. But when my daughter, Miss Picky, went with me to Crate and Barrel and said let's buy this pretzel mix, we can do it together. Who could resist?

So off we went with our packages, me with lots of fun gadgets for the kitchen and Miss Picky, who stopped at a few, or what seemed liked hundreds, of clothing stores all along the way! When we got home, I put the package of pretzel mix way in the back of the pantry, hoping she'd forget! I was so wrong. She didn't forget and today on a beautiful, sunny morning, Miss Picky said, let's bake the pretzels together. and so we did. And we lived happily ever after.

The end.

Actually Miss Picky turned out to be a very good, and very patient baker. Unlike her mother :) The pretzels came out really good. Better than good. They were fantastic. The mix was good, just pre-measured flour with salt and sugar, yeast and pretzel salt! I could probably measure it out myself. Maybe. We just added melted butter and water! Miss Picky kneaded it by hand. and we rolled them out.  Pain in the neck. That dough is elastic and no matter how much we rolled, they shrunk went back to being small! So we dropped them in the boiling water anyway and then baked them! For 12 minutes and they ended up being the best pretzels we've had! A very big hit. So I looked for a recipe online for next time, because these were so good, there has to be a next time. and I found this one by Alton Brown. It looks extremely close to the mix we used!

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/homemade-soft-pretzels-recipe/index.html

We started with fruit smoothies. Frozen strawberries, bananas and some strawberry sorbet! A little cup of berry yogurt, a fresh apricot and some granola. A little bit of apple juice to thin it out. Whizzed in the blender, it's really good with a side of pretzel!

It took a couple of tries, but we finally got the hang of rolling out the dough!

Some ended up as pretzel sticks!

Not too bad. A little crusty crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside. They were great, better than the ones from the mall!

This is our finished product!

Tweet