Chocolate Acorn Treats

 

Ohhh, fall is just around the corner and I really can't wait. I LOVE fall. I love being outside, camping, playing, walking, anything. I love using the sunroof on the van and having the kids shriek, "close the windows!!" because it's so windy back there. There is something about a fall day that makes me feel Alive with a capital A. I cannot imagine living in a climate without all four seasons, if only to appreciate spring and fall when they come. When we went on our honeymoon in Alaska, nine short years ago, we went in September for two weeks. Those two weeks were the sum total of Alaska's fall season. Two short little weeks!! I'm so glad our's lasts a little longer here in the south. Fall is glorious! 

When I saw these adorable treats in Family Fun magazine (can you tell I really love this magazine?), I knew I had to make them. They are sooooo cute and perfectly autumnal. They were seriously easy. The kids did them without my help. They ended up with a little extra icing in strange places, like the shoulder of a tee shirt and inside an ear, but they had a great time and they were so immensely proud when we served them to friends.

If you need a little fall in your life, you must make these. Here's what you need:

• Hershey's chocolate kisses (you must buy Hershey's since purchasing those products benefits the Hershey School which we learned all about when we went to Hershey Park and toured the town)
• mini Nilla wafers (do not buy generic, they are not small enough, this I learned the hard way)
• thin pretzel sticks
• icing (really this should be chocolate brown, but I was lazy and already had leftover white) 

 

Unwrap twice as many kisses as you'll need because invariably someone will come along and pop several into their mouth before you realize what is happening. You'll only need a few pretzel sticks, so you can use the rest for enjoying with homemade hummus.

Put a tiny bit of icing, store bought is just fine, just buy chocolate or at least a cream color. The brown blends in so much better that it really won't matter how much icing the kids slather on, unlike my white icing, which shows up when it oozed out. My kids went a little nutty with the icing. I had to get that in :)

Stick the flat side of the kiss to the underside of the vanilla mini wafer.

Put a dab of icing on the top of the cookie and break a tiny bit of pretzel stick off. Put the pretzel in the icing. These need to set up for an hour or so. You can speed up the process by putting them in the fridge, but it might make your cookies a little soft (and the kiss really hard).

You can assembly line them if you want to make bunches. Assign each kid a job and you can make massive amounts for teacher gifts, preschool snack, grandparents day, Thanksgiving dinner. You could set up a table to entertain the kids during Thanksgiving and put the supplies for chocolate acorns and the gumdrop turkeys.

Tell the kids they can play a little trick on the grown ups and have them put some real acorns collected from the yard on the table with the chocolate acorns and see if the adults notice. Everyone will get a kick out of that!