When we received Auntie Anne's At-Home Baking Kit, I decided to let the boys decide which of these tasty recipes they wanted to help me make. They LOVE the Pretzel Dogs at Auntie Anne's in the mall so they opted to try that.
So we started prepping our pretzel dough. I was a little nervous as I have never used, let alone 'made' yeast dough in my life.
But with a little help from my future chef, we did pretty well. And wound up with what I thought looked like a decent ball of dough.
Then we wrapped it up as directed, and waited....
After 25 minutes or so it had risen but not very much. This was just from sitting on top of the preheated stove. Since I didn't have it in a heat safe bowl I couldn't put it IN the oven as was suggested by some Twitter friends. And the over was already at 425 degree. So I just opened the over door and put the bowl right on the edge of the stove top and 20 minutes later it looked more like this...
It's sort of hard to tell by these photos but it had grown a good three times in size from where we started so I decided to go ahead and more forward.
We rolled it out and cut into pieces as directed.
Then we stretched and rolled the pieces. We soaked our hot dogs as directed and dipped the dough into a baking soda bath before putting them in the oven.
I had 16 dogs but only got 14 on the tray because I made sure they were plenty far apart. I'm not sure if they should have grown more when they cooked (because I'm such a kitchen novice) but they looked good to us and tasted AWESOME.
And the best part, there was plenty of dough left over for dessert. With the dough already prepped we just cut smaller pieces, dipped in baking soda bath and baked these pretzel sticks as directed. When they came out of the oven I brushed them with melted butter and covered them in the cinnamon sugar mixture.
I didn't tell anyone I was making these while they enjoyed their pretzel dogs but they LOVED them.
My thoughts:
I have to say I was a little nervous about trying this as it takes my typical bake and break or microwaving kitchen skills to a whole new level. But with everything included in the kit, I was able to make a great entree and dessert that my family loved. My dough working skills are weak to say the least and my items were very inconsistently sized/shaped but I was THRILLED that every bit of it came out edible. Some were slightly doughier if they were significantly larger but nothing was burnt or undercooked. This is really totally doable for a newbie and is great for kids to do (with supervision of course). The ONLY thing we thought could have made this better would have been to have some icing to dip our cinnamon sticks into. Otherwise, two BIG thumbs up for our household!
Check out Auntie Anne's Online:
Or find the Baking Kit at your local retailer!
Disclosure: I wrote this review while participating in a Blog Friendly PR campaign on behalf of Auntie Annes. I received a sample for my participation, all opinions are my own!
Oh those hot dogs look yummy! I am heading to Amazon next to see if I can order these kits!
ReplyDelete