fitfool

a bunch of the snacks laid out on a tray

I love being helpful. So here's a little tip. If you're going to spend any part of the day typing "Can chocolate go bad and make you sick?" then do so BEFORE you've eaten the chocolate you're nervous about. I'm still not sure if that was the culprit but I went to bed last night with a gurgling, complaining stomach. The answers I found online were all over the place. Some answers said chocolate was plenty shelf-stable and might get discolored when it de-emulsified but that would just make it lose some of its flavor, not make you sick. Other answers said to toss it out if there were any white spots visible (I think that was white mold). Still others said creepy crawling things sometimes set up shop in chocolate.

I'm not much of a chocolate snob but from now on, when a recipe calls for good chocolate, I'm going to interpret that to mean "use chocolate that hasn't gone bad" or at least "use chocolate that you still remember buying."

I'm going to be sad if it wasn't the chocolate that had gone bad since I'm throwing out the rest of the batch.
These tasted and looked delicious before I became suspicious of them.

What should I call these? I started out intending to make chocolate-covered graham crackers and then had leftover chocolate so I tried making chocolate-covered pretzels. But then I needed a place to set them down. And then I tried eating them all together. Sweet chocolate mixed with the salty pretzels and the crunch of the graham cracker and pretzels was a perfect treat. I'm definitely going to make these again some time.

I set up a makeshift double-boiler and dumped in half a bag of chocolate chips. After awhile, I added half a stick of butter since it seemed to be taking forever to melt. Once all was melted, I spooned the chocolate over the crackers and then pressed a pretzel into the chocolate. Set aside on a tray covered with a sheet of wax paper.

But use good chocolate! You never want to have to tell your loved ones, "Sorry I poisoned you."