Candy Bird Nests

This Spring the kids and I made those candy 'bird nests'. Kind of like rice krispy treats only cute. It is a slow process but easy and takes only a few ingredients. I found this recipe somewhere online. You can use just half the ingredients if you only want one pan. I liked that these were not sickeningly sweet. Some recipes use other things for nest material.



Bird Nest Treats


Ingredients:
8 cups chow mein noodles (La choy in the bag at walmart is a cheap price)

1/2 cup butter

4 cups mini marshmallows ( I used a 10.5 oz bag)

non-stick cooking spray

Mini 'robin eggs' , jelly beans or whatever you want to use (I like the speckled blue)

Instructions:

Coat 2 muffin tins with non-stick spray.

In a large pan, melt butter and marshmallows over low eat.

Stir in the noodles until completely coated with the mixture. This takes a while. Use a nice stiff spoon and dont put your hands in the hot goo!

Fill each of the cups in the muffin tins with the noodle mess. Dont overfill. I actually used a mini muffin tin to make little ones that are easier to share and a more reasonable portion for us...because they were turning out rather huge. So just use however many tins you need to get them the size you want. Just dont forget to spray them.

Get your hands greesy or spray with non-stick spray. Use your hands to carefully hollow out the center of each cup..pushing the noodles up the edges of the pan a bit to make a nest shape.

Cover the muffin pan loosely with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for about 1/2 hour.

Reserving the plastic wrap you used, remove the nests from the pan and place onto your serving tray. Loosely cover again with your plastic wrap and return them to the fridge until completely set .

Once they are cold and firm remove them from the fridge and let them dry out a little bit. They will be much less fragile as they dry and harden.

You are now ready to fill with your candy eggs and serve or place in cellophane bags.