This summer, Buddy and I have been doing What’s Cooking Wednesdays. He loves to cook, and it’s fun to have an excuse to find kitchen activities for him. Buddy has been asking to do Disney activities a lot recently, so I decided to make Mickey pretzels with him. It is a favorite snack of ours when we are in Disney World, and we were both excited to try it at home.
I got my inspiration from Smart School House’s blog. She uses a can of pretzel dough. I have seen other people use canned pizza dough for pretzels. I didn’t have either of those on hand, though, so I used the hot buttered pretzel recipe from King Arthur Flour. While it was a little more work to make our own dough, it wasn’t too difficult and they were amazingly delicious at the end.
We made the dough by combining 2 1/2 cups bread flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon sugar, 2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast, and 1 cup warm water in our mixer. Then we put in a greased bowl and covered with a light towel. The recipe calls for the dough to rise for 30 minutes, but we left it for an hour while Buddy napped.
When we returned to the dough, we split it into 6 equal sized pieces and rolled each into a long log. Our final pretzels were about the size of a dinner plate, so you could do more than 6 parts if you want smaller pretzels. After we made our logs we turned one into a circle to be a Mickey head. Then we split another one to be the two ears.
Next, we put 2 tablespoons of baking soda in 1 cup of boiling water and put it into a 13 x 9 baking pan. You are supposed to let the water cool a bit before dipping the pretzels. We dipped each pretzel into the mixture, and I used a spoon to bath the top part of the pretzel for 2 minutes. Then they went on the baking pan.
We baked the pretzels for 9 minutes at 475 degrees. They came out perfectly done. Then we brushed on 3 tablespoons of melted butter and put kosher salt on two. My husband dipped his in a cinnamon sugar mixture instead.
Our Mickey pretzels were even better than the ones in the parks! And the taste was very, very similar to the ones we get in the mall. We loved them and will be making more pretzels with this recipe in the future.
