Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Brownie

Why hello everyone! This week we are back with a blog post about a cute and easy Christmas baking project. This treat can be simplified so that you can whip it up last minute or can be more detailed if you are looking to spend a little more time on it. We are making reindeer brownies! This idea is not new and you have probably seen pictures of similar brownies scattered across Pinterest, but here is my take on the fun treat.

I used a box brownie mix. If you have a favorite homemade brownie recipe, that you would rather use instead, please go ahead! I went for the easy choice and just doctored up a box mix. For this recipe you will also need some pretzels (I went with chocolate covered, but you could also just use plain ones), red and green M&Ms, some candy eye balls, and some cupcake pan liners.

To start off this treat, I cut up some chocolate covered pretzels to resemble reindeer antlers. To do this I gingerly cut the pretzels in half and then chopped away a little more to get something that vaguely resembled a number 3 or letter E. As I’m sure you can imagine, there were a lot of pretzels shattered in this process, so I kept all of the fragments to add into the brownie batter. I cut 12 pairs of antlers as I planned on cutting 12 brownies from the pan.

I also added some green M&Ms to the brownie batter for color and chocolatey goodness. I splashed in a bit of cinnamon and vanilla as well and the brownies were all set to go into the oven. Once the brownies were cooled, I cut them into 12 squares. I pushed the antlers into the top of the brownies so that they hung over the edge of the brownie a bit. I then pushed in the candy eyes (I honestly do not remember what brand these are as I had them leftover from a previous project) and a red M&M as the reindeer nose. These brownies were for a work party so I put each brownie in a cupcake liner to make them easier to grab. And then they were done!

A few ways to simplify this even more would be to buy mini pretzels and just use 2 whole pretzels as the antlers. This would cut out the time spent meticulously cutting apart pretzels. You could also forgo the candy eyes entirely and just use any red candy you have on hand for the reindeer nose. If you have antlers and a red nose, I assume people will be able to understand that it’s a reindeer.

Some ways to fancy these treats up even more would be to use homemade brownies as I mentioned before and/or to cut the brownies into the shape of a reindeer head rather than leaving them in squares. You could also add frosting to the top of the brownies. If using frosting you could cover the entire brownie surface so that the nose, eyes and antlers could be stuck in the frosting instead of being pushed into the brownie itself or the frosting could be piped out in a more detailed way to give the reindeer face some shape and definition.

What holiday baking projects have you been doing? Let me know in the comments below!

 - Rebecca