Honest And Truly!: white chocolate party mix

As part of the celebration for Little Miss's birthday, I made a white chocolate party mix that was super yum. The inspiration for this came from the birthday party we'd attended the week prior. It had been made by my friend's mother and she doesn't share her recipes. Well, fine. Give me a challenge. How hard could it be?

Start with our ingredients:

4 c. Cheerios
6 c. Rice Chex (or the knockoff brand like I used)
3 c. pretzel shaped or waffle cut pretzels
3 c. M&Ms
2 c. craisins (my inspiration, ha!)
1 1/2 lb premium white chocolate*

*I tried this with Hershey's premium white chocolate chips and with the white chocolate chips from our local buy in bulk yummy stuff store. Hershey's was far superior. Definitely don't use almond bark. Find the best white chocolate you can and use it. It makes that much of a difference.

Place the white chocolate in a very heavy saucepan (I love my Le Creuset!) or in a double boiler and melt over medium low heat.

Cover the pot to ensure the heat is being evenly distributed and not just cooking the bottom part.

After about a few minutes, turn off the heat and begin stirring. It will look like this at first, which makes you think it won't melt.

However, it will quickly get to this consistency. Do you see how nice and pourable it got? Yum! Try not to eat it directly out of the pot.

While the chocolate is melting, place the remaining ingredients in a veeeeerrrry large bowl or roaster pan or something that will allow you to stir it without having everything go flying everywhere. I also love my giant bowls from IKEA.

Gently mix the dry stuff together without breaking anything (read: Rice Chex).

Use the spatula to drizzle the white chocolate onto the dry stuff. Only do about a quarter or so of the chocolate at a time and mix well in between or you'll end up with massive gobs of chocolate and lots of dry other stuff.

Eventually, it will look like this.

You'll want to put waxed paper on a counter. I have sheets of it (yep, more Costco stuff!), and it fills up about six sheets. I got smart somehow and realized that if you have a damp counter, the waxed paper sheets will stay in place while spreading the mix rather than sliding all over the counter. And I swear I figured this out via brains and not via trial and error. I'm still not sure how that happened.

Once the mix is all ummm mixed, pour it out onto the waxed paper and use the spatula to spread it out so that it hardens into manageable chunks. Once it hardens (less than an hour in the middle of summer for me), you'll want to break it up a little more, but not too much.