Adventures in candymaking

Not to be boastful, but cooking has never really been a challenge for me. I'm not a gourmet cook or anything like that, but I manage to keep my little family well fed and happy. I can cook from recipes and have them turn out correctly the first time. I am also one of those people that can take 5 seemingly random things from the pantry and make a decent meal of them (if I have the time and/or the inclination). In the last year and a half, I have taught my husband the fine art of family cooking, and he's not too shabby either. Both of us are also accomplished bakers. Cookies, cakes, bars.... either out of a box or from scratch. I've never really understood how someone can screw up a Betty-Crocker-out-of-the-box cake, but I know it happens. (Sorry to those of you who can screw up a Betty Crocker cake, no offense intended....)

So, my sister-in-laws make these fabulous peanut butter confections that are ingloriously known just as peanut butter balls. We've tried to come up for a better name for them, but so far have had no luck. Chris calls them "schweddy balls" which is waaaaay worse, but that's Chris for you. I decided that I wanted to make some of these glorious little treats this year, and had one of my sis-in-laws email me the recipe. Looking at it, I was not daunted in the least. After all, why should I be??? It's just pb, butter, powdered sugar, rice krispies, and chocolate. Right? If I had only known......

The middle peanut butter part went together without a flaw. Tasted right, was the right consistency, molded into the little balls just perfectly. Nothing to this, I thought. To melt the chocolate, I did everything according to instruction- even putting a pyrex bowl in a pan of hot water to melt the chips slooooooowly, even when my instinct told me that I should just microwave them like I do for other projects. Cool, the chocolate melted just like it should- nice and smooth. (Milk chocolate chips, by the way. We are NOT semi-sweet people in this house.)
So, I dunked the first pb ball into the chocolate. And it sank. Into the sludge. I fished it back out with a spoon, but the excess chocolate was not dripping off like I though it should. Okay, it's too thick.... I'll just thin it out a bit; if I don't, there's no way this one bag of chips is going to cover the whole mess of pb balls I have here. So, I pour a couple tablespoons of milk into the mix. Cold milk. Uh huh.

Well, my previously beautifully smooth bowl of chocolate clumped into a boulder of solidified mess that I couldn't do a thing with. I had one of those "smack your foreheads you're so stupid" moments. You don't pour cold liquid into warm chocolate. Of course it clumped. So, I tossed the clump, then I melted the rest of the first bag of chips with some leftover chips I had in the pantry. Still same thick consistency. Then I heated a few tbsp of milk and poured it in, thinking it would thin the choc out nicely. Can you imagine the words that I said when it clumped into a solidified mess again? Good thing the kids weren't paying attention. I almost threw in the towel then. But, I had one more bag of chocolate chips hiding in the back of the pantry. Not the good milk chocolate Ghirardelli chips that we love, but some stand-by Nestle milk chocolate chips that aren't near as good.

This time I put the milk in the bowl with the chocolate and melted it together. We didn't get a clumpy mess this time, but somehow the chocolate went from being acceptable milk chocolate to almost semi-sweet yuck. I'm not sure if I burned the chocolate, or if it reacted to the milk in some way. The result was just as thick as the original Ghirardelli chocolate, but (at the end of my candy-making rope by now) I covered the rest of the pb balls without trying to thin it out further. It was Christmas day, and if I screwed up this last batch of chocolate, we would have been left with just the naked pb balls.

Apparently candy making is not my forte. Unfortunately, I take getting things like this right as a personal challenge. My husband may be stuck eating mediocre peanut butter treats for awhile, until I master the art of melting chocolate for dipping.
See how the one on the far right actually looks like milk chocolate??? I'm still not sure quite what happened. Chris and Paige both tell me they're tasty....... but I'm not so sure.

We'll see how they turn out next time!