Make Your Own Pretzels

Does anybody else ever have trouble coming up with program ideas? At the end of the summer, we obviously start planning for our Fall programs, and its always a crazy time trying to figure out what we're going to be doing.

One of the programs I struggle with the most is our Play With Your Food cooking program. While I'm not totally inept in the kitchen, it is still a little intimidating to be in charge of telling kids how to cook something that is going to taste good when you are finished.

But, the programs we've done so far have been successful, fun, and have tasted pretty good, so I guess I'll just try to do what I've been doing =D

All of that to say, the first program we held for 3-5 graders this Fall was Make Your Own Pretzels. I grabbed a recipe from allrecipes.com, and went for it. Turns out that the recipe is quite fabulous, and the kids had a really good time making them.

One thing the recipe didn't mention that we tried was making our own shapes instead of everyone sticking with the traditional pretzel shape. We made chips, hearts, balls, and even a lizard.

While the program worked really well, the one problem we had was with the dough. It tended to be a little dry which made it harder to mold, but adding a little bit of extra oil seemed to help, and they turned out awesome in the end.