I'd seen adorable witch brooms like these around Pinterest a few times & could not resist. Some were made with cheese slices fringed along the bottom and then rolled around the pretzel stick, but the string cheese version sounded much easier. A little too easy ~ I seemed to hit a snag at each step & had to come up with several tricks I'll share here.
1) The directions said to cut the cheese sticks in half, but that seemed way too long! You could probably do thirds, but I chose to cut mine in fourths.
2) Pushing the pretzel stick in one end cracked the cheese sticks every time. So I grabbed a drinking straw and pushed it down about 1/2 inch in the center of one end and twisted it to remove a chunk (save this piece). The perfect size for a pretzel stick!
Sometimes the chunk came out easily, sometimes I had to insert it & twist some more. If it really wouldn't come out I just pushed the straw all the way through to the bottom.
3) On the opposite end you cut slits all around, cutting about halfway up the cheese. I cut the bottom of the cheese in half, rotated it a quarter turn and cut it in half again. Then I sliced each of those fourths 2-3 times (don't worry too much about spacing).
The sample brooms from the link looked nice and flared, but mine just looked like a cheese stick with faint lines! I could have spread them out & carefully posed them for a picture, but I wanted them to flare naturally a bit. So I took that chunk we removed from the other end and shoved it in the center of the 'bristles', pushing up until they spread. (If you had to go all the way through the cheese with the straw, just fold the piece in half & push them both in)
4) Now just insert the pretzel and knot a piece of green onion above the slits! My green onions were very wide so I cut one into very thin strips. Just be sure to cut it much longer than needed, because they are fiddly to tie & break easily. They did not seem too secure, but I didn't have any come apart later (chilling in the fridge probably helped).
I put mine in a tupperware in the fridge, and when I pulled them out the next day the pretzel sticks were soft and bendy! Of course they could easily be replaced, but if you are going to store them I'd wait & add them before serving. Now you are ready to make an army of little brooms!
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