Caramel Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Bites (Like Take 5)

These are good candies and would be great for holiday cookie platters. I used about 3 cups of pretzels to start with. To apply the peanut butter, I cut the corner off a freezer bag and loaded a couple of big spoonfuls of PB in it and "piped" a teaspoon or so on each pretzel. I didn't use nearly the entire jar, in fact I had some PB left in the bag and squirted it back into the jar. I found the caramel pretty tricky to work with. I ended up using two baby spoons to drop globs of it on top of the peanut butter. I used a regular bag of semisweet chocolate chips melted with a tablespoon of shortening. Half way through dipping in chocolate, I thought white vanilla almond bark might be good also so I dipped the other half of the pretzels in that. At first I was concerned about the caramel, it had hardened so much that it made the candies almost unedible, but the next day (I just kept these on the counter at room temp) the caramel had somewhat softened a bit and actually have the consistency of the real candy bar. I will make these again for the holidays and try milk chocolate as well. I might make my own caramel from scratch, if time permits. These are somewhat cumbersome to put together but they are really good!

WOW! I had so much fun making these (and eating them!) Though they can be messy putting together, the last step of dipping them in the chocolate makes it all worth while. Definitely easy to make. Only problem I ahd was that I didn't get the caramel "thin" enough to be able to "drizzle" instead of "clump" on each pretzel. Too much caramel makes it tough to eat. My hubby turned his nose up when I told him I was making these - but I just noticed he ate half of the batch I made!! This is a keeper!! Thanks! Made for PAC 2008.