Sunday will forever be known as Santa hat day. “Santa hat reindeer food day” to be exact.

The Princess Cupcake is all about melting chocolate, dipping things into chocolate, dipping chocolate into sprinkles, eating things dipped in chocolate, stirring things in chocolate… so I knew I had a winning project for us. When she saw our little chocolate Santa hats, she mimicked me as perfectly as when she shows me her art from school that day,

(Audible gasp) “MO-OM. These are BEAUTIFUL. I LOVE them! I really, really love them!!!”

Trust me, if you get half the reaction I did, you’ll want to make these. Don’t worry if they aren’t perfect. They will be in the eyes of your little one.

SO I broke this up into two projects:

Hazelnut Reindeer Food (adapted from the Food Network magazine)

What you need:

Small jar of Nutella
½ a stick of butter
A box of Chex cereal – we used the cinnamon kind
1 pound box of powdered sugar
Yogurt covered raisins – 1 bag
M&M’s – the red and green ones – roughly half of a large bag
Gallon size zip lock bag
Optional: red and green sprinkles (we opted not)

What you do:

Melt all the Nutella with the butter in a bowl in the microwave. I recommend doing this at 50% power in 30 second increments. I know it’s a pain, but I actually made this twice and the second time when I nuked it full blast, the chocolate got hard again and I had to put in more butter to thin it out. It was a mess. Better to go slow.

Stir the Nutella butter dreaminess into a large bowl containing all the cereal. Stir to coat.

Spoon the cereal mixture into the zip lock bag and dump in all the powdered sugar. Zip it shut and shake to coat.

Pour all the cereal mixture back into your big bowl and add your yogurt covered raisins and M&M’s.

Toss/stir from the bottom so you don’t crush the cereal but mix the candy in well. Perfect for reindeers and humans alike!

Enjoy!

 

Santa Hats (adapted from Cookies and Cups)

These were just too cute not to try! And the perfect compliment to reindeer food.

Here’s what you need:

Bugles – I bought the caramel crunch ones
Red candy melts
White sprinkles or non-pareiles
Mini-marshmallows

Here’s what you do:

Melt your candy melts.

Dip your Bugles in. Cover completely and lay on a cookie sheet with parchment paper or non-stick foil.

Once they’ve set, dip the top of the Bugle into the candy again and secure a mini-marshmallow. Let set again on your covered cookie sheet.

Pour your white sprinkles into a small bowl.

Dip the wide end of your Bugle back into the warm candy melts, just the bottom tip. Enough to make a white cuff on your Santa hat, but not a lot of candy. Tap gently to remove the excess. Then immediately dip into the white sprinkles. Let me repeat this part: Try to tap as much of the chocolate off as you can. I found that 3 year olds are prone to excessive dipping, which leads to clumps of chocolate in our white sprinkles. And sprinkles aren’t cheap so… teaching the Princess how to tap the chocolate off gently wasn’t working so well. We changed our assembly line to I dip in the chocolate, she dipped in the sprinkles. Everyone was happy.

Now you might be thinking, “Hmm. I think I’ll use WHITE candy melts on the bottom to give more even coverage.” I’m with ya. But don’t do it. The red on the Santa hat starts to melt off into your white trim chocolate, and before you know it, you’ll have a whole pot of pink. Trust me, stick with red candy melts exclusively.

These were a huge hit at our house. We actually made them for her snack day at school and the Cupcake was SO proud. And guess what, since it’s made with Nutella, we got the green light from our peanut-free zone. Yea! We had lots of hats left over so we made another batch of the reindeer food the next day for my office. One glitch, the Cupcake doesn’t want me to give any of them away so — sorry friends. We had to ration them out. The rest are staying highly guarded with her and Chintz.