Chocolate, Caramel, and Walnut Covered Pretzels

For this Valentine's Day dessert, I used a trial and non-error technique. I call it that because even the batches that I didn't serve on Valentine's Day were so delicious that I made sure to diligently snack on them for the next week. This is how I made them:

First I started with 3 ounces of semi-sweet bakers chocolate.

I didn't want the chocolate to burn, so I fashioned my own double boiler out of small and medium sized saucepans. I boiled the water in the medium one and then put the smaller one with the chocolate inside.

Here's another view with the water boiling and the chocolate melted.





Batch #1:

For the first batch, I threw the pretzels into the small pot and totally covered them in chocolate. I took each one out separately with a fork to let the excess chocolate drizzle off. Then I put them on a cookie sheet covered in tinfoil to cool.

Then I made some caramel sauce with butter, cream, brown sugar, vanilla, and corn syrup.

I let it melt then stirred it while it boiled. Then I took it off the heat to let it cool for 15 minutes.

When the caramel sauce had properly cooled, I drizzled it over the chocolate covered pretzels and then sprinkled chopped walnuts on top. I realized that the saltiness was too hidden, so then I sprinkled a tiny bit of rock sea salt on top.  Then I let them cool in the refrigerator for 10 minutes.

Then I boxed them up, thinking this was the end. Then I decided (not at all because someone mentioned that they might be too chocolatey...ahem) to try another batch that was more like pretzel clusters and not individual pretzels. Hence, batch #2.



Batch #2:

In this batch I put the pretzels in a bowl and poured some of the melted chocolate in. I stirred them up and lightly coated them. Then I crunched them up into large chunks.

I put the pieces onto the tinfoil, drizzled the caramel, and added the walnuts and a tinier bit of sea salt, because the salt on the pretzels was more noticeable. I put this in the fridge overnight.

Then, the next night, Valentine's Day, I took the pieces and broke them apart into chunks of chocolatey, caramely, salty, crunchy goodness.

To use up some of the extra cream and caramel, I made coffee with homemade whipped cream and caramel sauce.

In the following days,  I had a whole tray of pretzel pieces left and two boxes of chocolate covered pretzels left, which I was going to bring to work to share, but (sorry ladies) we ate them all before I got the chance!

Which would you have picked, the chocolate submersion (batch 1) or pretzels lightly coated in chocolate and a bit more salty (batch 2)? Either way, you can't beat a salty sweet combination, especially with some serious pretzel and walnut crunch action!

Thanks for reading my thoughts about food!