Guilt-free popcorn snacks to make movie nights more fun
Christmas Tree Brownies
There are so many good things to be said for Christmas tree brownies. To start with, they are brownies. Rich, fudgy, chocolate brownies that pretty much everyone likes. Next, they are frosted for an extra layer of fun and flavor and sweetness. Then they are shaped like Christmas trees to make them festive and visually irresistible. The tree trunks? Those are candy canes! And finally, we topped them with our recipe for candy cane popcorn. There is not one thing not to love, right?
Although we sometimes get a little snooty about desserts being homemade, we admit that box mix brownies are really good. So good that we’re not even sure we can do better. So we will focus our home baking energy on other holiday treats and take the box help for this one.
Just choose your favorite mix and follow the directions on the package. They usually require eggs, water and oil and we didn’t change any of the ingredients or sneak in any extras. But what we did do was bake these in a sheet pan instead of the normal sized baking dish used for brownies. It meant using two packages of brownie mix and we totally checked that baking two together works fine. These brownies will be a little thinner than the traditional kind but we wanted that because we were cutting out tree shapes.
Just line a standard size baking sheet with aluminum foil or parchment paper and, when baked, you’ll have a good amount of surface area to cut out lots of trees. We used a 4″ cutter but you can go a little smaller if you want. For the green frosting, you can use white chocolate mixed with green food color or vanilla frosting mixed with green food color. Either one will work so do whatever you like best and is easiest. You can use pretzel rods for the tree trunks if you prefer but we were topping our trees with candy cane popcorn so we stayed with the theme.
Kids will love these. Adults will love these. Gift recipients will love these. What’s not to love?
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