Salted Chocolate & Caramel Shortbread  

Most years, I make chocolate covered caramel apples for gift baskets at Christmas time. So around Halloween & Thanksgiving, when caramel apple wraps show up in the supermarkets, I stock up. These flattened rounds of caramel are simply wrapped around the apple and are so much easier, faster, and less messy than dipping in melted caramel.



This year I was looking at the wraps and wondering what else I could do with them. I got the idea to spruce up some store-bought cookies for a holiday treat. This is what I came up with. Not genius, but still yummy. :9



I bought some shortbread cookies and the kids and I cut the wraps into squares and mashed them onto the cookies. You can use two of the triangular pieces to cover a cookie so there's no wasted caramel.





Then I melted some semi-sweet chocolate chips with a smidge of bees' wax and shmeared a thin layer on the bottom of each cookie and waited for the chocolate to harden up.




Next I used a fork to hold each cookie over the pot while I covered the top with chocolate. Tap the handle of the fork on the edge of the pot to get rid of excess chocolate. (I never in my life, thought I would use the words "excess" and "chocolate" together.)



And lastly, I sprinkled each cookie with Celtic Sea Salt.



Again with the waiting. But once the chocolate was hard.....




Cup O' Chocolate Comfort  

I spotted THIS over on Heavenly Homemakers and decided to try it out this morning. I made a slightly bigger batch because my two oldest can eat a lot of breakfast. It was warm, smooth, and filling -just like she said. I bet it would even be good cold. But after we had all had a cup and there was quite a lot left in the pot, I got a wild urge to try it as hot chocolate.

So I dumped in a handfull of semi-sweet chocolate chips, a pinch of salt, a few sprinkles of cinnamon, a dollop of blackstrap molasses (if molasses can be said to dollop) and some more milk because it was pretty thick from these additions.





 The result was creamy, chocolatey and yummy!