Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Oddly enough my previous posting originally began as a recounting of our weekend family project. I have no idea how it morphed into its current form but there you are! LOL Following is what I originally intended to post on Monday...
We made peanut butter bon bons this weekend! What a fun time it was!
I did most of the measuring and the kids took turns dumping all the ingredients in the bowl. After that the three of us attempted to mix it all up. First Nathan gave it a try. He cut the margarine in and started folding, scooping from underneath, up to the top, squishing it down. His arm wore out real fast. Lindsay gave it a try. Her arm wore out even faster! I decided to give it a try. I may have lasted as long as Nathan did.
Obviously this was not going to work! I decided maybe it was time to try out my new food processor so headed over to get it together. I finished with that, turned around and saw Daniel standing over the bowl with the wooden spoon sporting a rather self satisfied grin. He'd done a wonderful job of mixing it all up!Great! Now it was a family project!
The kids dumped the cereal in and I mixed that up before we all proceeded to turn it all into a multitude of 1" balls. Once that was finished I melted the chocolate and set the kids up with toothpicks to do the dipping. It only took a couple minutes of watching them attempt to coat the balls and pull them out, only to have them slip off the toothpick and fall apart during attempts to respear them to realize that wasn't going to work out so I took over the dipping, placing the chocolate coated confections on parchment paper.
This is when Nathan had a brilliant idea! He thought it might be fun to decorate the candies with sprinkles! So, he and Lindsay took turns giving each freshly dipped candy a liberal dose of colorful sprinkles. They looked great! Just like downtown! They taste really good too! Kinda like krispy "Reese's" peanut butter cups!
The recipe we used was a combined version of 3 different recipe's I found:
Peanut Butter Bon Bons
18 oz. peanut butter
1/2 cup softened butter (we used nucoa margarine due to dairy issues)
4 cups powdered sugar
3 cups rice krispies cereal
12 oz. chocolate chips
2 Tbsp. shortening
Blend first three ingredients well then mix in the cereal. Form into 1" balls. Melt the chocolate chips (we used semi sweet) and the shortening on low in the microwave. Stir to smooth. Using toothpicks Dip the balls in the chocolate mixture, coating completely. Allow excess to drip off, and place coated balls on wax paper lined cookie sheet. Immediately sprinkle with colored sprinkles if desired.
Once the chocolate had set a bit we carefully stacked them between sheets of wax paper and placed in the refrigerator to finish setting. We're keeping them stored in the fridge due to the margarine content and to keep them out of sight (and somewhat out of mind).
Warning! This is a great family project but, if you're anything like us you can count on a gooey chocolatey mess! Chocolate chocolate everywhere! And somehow I seemed to be the messiest of all...
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