Valentines Day - A Week Late

I do my best to have a snack and a card for most holidays for my staff.  Depending on the time of year, there are usually between 25 and 30 employees which makes most of these projects very quick.  Christmas is the biggest event and since we have a holiday party, they only receive small items from me.  Valentines, St Patricks Day, Easter, 4th of July, etc all involve candy or a sweet treat on the actual holiday.

For Valentines Day, I opted to do something easy since I procrastinated until the night before and had to make snacks and cards for the whole 30 of them! Easy snacks were Valentines Muddy  Buddy Chex and Pretzel bites.  About 2 hours worth of shopping, "baking", cooling, and assembly and we were ready to go!

I didn't really use a recipe for the Muddy Buddy Mix, but had seen a few people throw popcorn and M&Ms into theirs so I did the same thing - plus red cookie sugar and a little melted red chocolate on top.  Muddy Buddies are a sweet version of Chex Mix and usually involve melted chocolate, peanut butter, and a TON of powdered sugar.  This actually holds pretty well, and my staff is still eating some of their bags several days later and it still seems good.  They did love the addition of the popcorn, so that will be a keeper and really stretches the batch since popcorn takes up lots of space but is cheap!

The pretzel bites are a steal from my mother-in-law and are one of my favorite quick treats! A bag of dollar store square pretzels will fill about 2 large jelly roll pans, two bags of colored chocolate melts to match your holiday, and a bag of M&Ms! These don't really involve a recipe, but the basics are - line the tray with a full layer of pretzels, put a chocolate melt on top of each pretzel.  Toss the tray in the oven at 250/300 for about 5 minutes.  Pull the tray out, and while the chocolate is still soft - press an M&M into each piece of chocolate.  Let them cool for 15 - 20 mins, dump off the tray and put into bags!

My staff loves the quick treats and to be honest - for $40 - $50 for the whole staff, it's a really cheap morale booster! Plus, hubs and dad love getting any leftovers (as do I). Do you do anything special for your staff?

Oh yeah - here is a picture of my Valentines Breakfast Date! (I'll share a little more info about our favorite breakfast spot in Friday's post - Hank's!)

I am not quite that pale, it's awful lighting and I didn't have make-up on! (Sorry, just needed that disclaimer before someone thought I was a vampire or something). And yeah, we def wore red and pink to breakfast (so cheesy, I love it)