Crunchy pretzel, gooey caramel, sweet shatter of chocolate shell–these Chocolate-Drizzled Salted Caramel Pretzels are the ultimate sweet and salty snack!
Hummus–delicious!
Peanut butter–the best!
Applesauce–sounds weird, but so good!
Spinach artichoke–yes please!
Chocolate–?!
Vegan cheese sauce–I’m not sharing!
Salsa…okay maybe not all dips.
But most of them are perfect on a pretzel. Plus it feels much less weird/socially wrong than peanut butter right off the spoon.
With so many pretzel trials recently, homemade pretzel sticks were an abundant resource in my kitchen. So I came up with the ultimate sweet and salty snack: Chocolate-Drizzled Salted Caramel Pretzels. And when I say sweet and salty, what I really mean is mostly sweet with a smidge of salty to make the sweet flavor even better.
The textural combination of crunchy pretzel + gooey caramel + hard chocolate shell is so good!
I almost made this crazy crunchy caramel-covered treat with actual, real-life, boiled-on-the-stove caramel. But 2 things stopped me: 1) That’s a lot of work. 2) Dates are so very delicious. Oh and bonus reason 3) I almost always burn myself when hot boiling sugar is involved. So that was out.
While I love date caramel to the moon and back, one of it’s fatal flaws is that it doesn’t harden. Not even in the freezer. (Unless you are making ice cream, in which case that’s an enormous advantage!)
I wasn’t asking for hard candy solid, just firm enough to be covered in chocolate without becoming chocolate caramel swirl pretzel mess. A reasonable request I think.
Coconut oil would be the obvious answer, but you guys know I like to keep it oil free around here. A few weeks back I made these delicious Snickers Ice Cream Bars from Feeding Your Beauty, and I remember that she used almond butter in her caramel sauce and it hardened up just enough in the freezer to be drowned in melted chocolate without a problem.
It doesn’t take much, just a tablespoon or so. And you can use any nut/seed butter you like: cashew, peanut, tahini, etc. Not only does it make for easier chocolate coverage, but it also makes for a marvelously much creamier date caramel texture. After about an hour of chilling in the freezer they are ready to be chocolate drizzled (or drowned), and then devouring is just a few more chilly minutes away!
If you really don’t want the extra fat then you can leave out the nut butter, but I’m warning you things might get melty and messy.
You might be confused, thinking “But a frozen pretzel??” Don’t judge. Don’t judge until after you dip, drizzle, and bite into a cold caramel-coated crunchy pretzel stick. It’s amazing! It only takes abut an hour of freezer time for the caramel to set up, and they don’t freeze solid, I promise.
Make room ice cream, you are not the only dessert deserving of a spot on the top shelf of the freezer. Because everyone organizes their freezer by deliciousness from top shelf to bottom, right?
And even the next day after their overnight stay in the freezer they were still delicious. Easy to bite into, perfect amount of caramel gooey-ness, and of course that sweet-shatter of chocolate shell!
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PrintChocolate Drizzled Salted Caramel Pretzels
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Cook Time: 15 minutes
- Total Time: 30 minutes
Ingredients
- 15–20 homemade or store-bought pretzel sticks
- 1 cup vegan chocolate chips
Date Caramel
- 10–12 pitted Medjool dates
- 1/2 cup non-dairy milk
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp vanilla bean powder (or 1 tsp vanilla extract)
- 1 tbsp almond butter (or any nut/seed butter)
Instructions
- Blend all the ingredients for the caramel.
- Dip each pretzel into the caramel, coating them well.
- Freeze for 1 hour.
- Melt the chocolate.
- Remove the pretzels from the freezer in small batches (they melt fast) and drizzle/coat with the melted chocolate.
- Return to the freezer for a few minutes to allow the chocolate to harden.
- Enjoy! Keep in the freezer.