Yes, they are big spiders, but you can scale them down to your preferred size without too much trouble (though you may want to use some other edible for smaller eyes).
Mark Guydish | For Times Leader
The ingredients for “Spider Bites” Halloween treats. It calls for about 5 cups of broken pretzels. I used less, and still ran out of chocolate before I got halfway done, so consider cutting the amount to 4 cups of pretzels, or up the chocolate.
Mark Guydish | For Times Leader
I told MT early one morning that I planned to make “Spider Bites,” and she replied with some alarm: “You have spider bites?”
Fear not, these are the spiders you bite, not the other way around. I found the recipe while hunting for a Halloween-appropriate option, and MT even took them on a taste-testing tour, garnering a lot of positive comments.
“They’re as big as tarantulas,” news editor Liz Baumeister observed, followed by “they’re creepily cute.”
“They’re darling,” MT’s friend Chris said, when she had a peek at the Spider Bites.
Interestingly enough, neither Liz nor Chris actually took a bite of these chocolate and pretzel spiders, “sampling” them only with their eyes.
But as MT made her rounds offering the Spider Bites to potential newsroom taste testers as well as friends elsewhere, there were people eager to actually eat them.
“I’m very excited about this,” reporter Sam Zavada said with anticipation, later pronouncing his Spider Bite to be “excellent.”
“They’re very tasty, very festive,” sportswriter Kevin Carroll said. “I like the saltiness of the pretzels with the chocolate.”
Well, that is a classic combination, and these deliver it big time.
“Ooh, I like it,” reporter Margaret Roarty said, adding that she, too, is a fan of chocolate and pretzels together.
Because each individual Spider Bite was so large, page designer Lyndsay Bartos asked for just part of one.
“They’re fun,” she said, adding they were a little too “messy to eat” for her taste. “But I’m sure kids would love it,” she added.
When neighbor Roger stopped by and agreed to sample one he similarly said “they’re good, but messy.”
The ones I made were a tad disorderly to eat, mostly because they fell apart a bit too easily once you started. But you could probably fix that one of two ways: Break the pretzels up to smaller pieces and use more chocolate/peanut butter mix to hold them together, or just make the spiders themselves smaller. You can break pretzel sticks into shorter pieces for legs, and you don’t need to worry too much about them being equal lengths, as long as they aren’t too different. Once you spread the chocolate that makes the “back,” these hold together pretty well. You can also skip the white chocolate eyes, though I think that worked well on these big spiders.
One warning from experience: It calls for about 5 cups of broken pretzels, but I did a bit less than that and still ran out of chocolate barely half-way through spider construction. Consider either using 3 or 4 cups to start, or keep an extra bag of chocolate morsels in case you run out of the first batch. We had a bag of milk chocolate morsels in stock, so when I ran out of the semi-sweet chocolate mix, I melted a cup of those and a quarter cup of peanut butter to allow further spider construction — And I still ran out of chocolate before all the coated pretzels were used.
One note on the website where I got the recipe: if you opt to visit it, watch the video. It gives much more information than the written directions, which skip some important steps. The biggest difference is that the written recipe online says to just form the spider bodies with clean hands, while the video showed the chef using two tablespoons to put them on the parchment paper and shape them.
Dobru chut!
Spider Bites (foodnetwork.com, Sandra Lee)
1 (12-ounce) package semisweet morsels
½ cup creamy peanut butter
6 cups pretzel sticks
Mini white chocolate morsels
Place parchment paper on baking sheet; set aside.
In a large glass microwave-safe bowl, combine chocolate chips and peanut butter. Melt on high for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring every minute or so. Remove and stir until smooth. You can also melt them on the stove top in a pot, which is what I did.
Break up most of the pretzel sticks (about 5 cups), into smaller pieces. These will make the bodies. Save enough whole sticks for the legs — remembering that arachnids have eight legs.
Save some chocolate/peanut butter mix for the legs and the backs of the spiders. Stir the rest into the pretzels until well-coated. With clean hands or, better yet, two tablespoons, grab pretzel sticks and drop on parchment-lined baking sheet in clusters, forming ovals to look like spider bodies. Make them proportional to the whole sticks you reserved for legs (you can break longer sticks into slightly shorter ones if you think that looks better).
Roll whole sticks one at a time in chocolate and place four on each side of a “body.” If you don’t mind getting fingers coated with chocolate, you can cover the entire leg, but they look fine if you leave the ends uncoated. Space legs fairly evenly on each side of the body.
Spread a little more chocolate/pb mix onto the spider “back,” smoothing it out and adding a small dollop on one end as the “head.” Add two white chocolate bits as eyes.
Place in freezer for 5 minutes, or until chocolate is hardened. Remove and serve.
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