Adventures In Squaring The Circle
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I believe I’ve mentioned this in previous posts, but among the holiday baking traditions for my family are: Christmas Cherry Coffee Cake, Almond Butter Cookies, Ragamuffin Cookies, and Peanut Butter Balls. In fact, as with the Ragamuffin cookies, my family did our best to persuade my mother to make her peanut butter balls on every “occasion.” (Happy Tuesday! Have a peanut butter ball…) For a few years, while I (or later on, my brother) was making Ragamuffin Cookies for craft sales at Christmas and Easter, my mother made peanut butter balls. Well, more accurately, she made peanut butter balls at Christmas, but used the same recipe/method to make peanut butter eggs at Easter. She even managed to put a little royal icing leaf and flower on each egg. They sold like hotcakes! The lady running the craft sale came to my mother repeatedly, asking her to make more eggs as each batch sold out. As I recall, my mother did make a couple additional batches for sale but finally put her foot down and said she was done…there were other things in the world to do than make more peanut butter eggs. (Sacrilege!)
These days, my mother leaves most of the Christmas baking to me and her daughters-in-law. My middle brother’s wife is the one who regularly makes many of the traditional holiday bakes, but I sometimes bestir myself also. However, I’ve always found peanut butter balls to be a little fiddly for my taste. It’s not like they’re hard to make, because they aren’t. But rolling each ball by hand and then dipping them into molten chocolate and then leaving them to harden up? Too time consuming and messy for me. So…I thought of a different way. What if I could just treat the whole project like chocolate peanut butter fudge?
So, I made the peanut butter filling (it’s not in the recipe, but I like to add a generous slug of my homemade vanilla) and patted it into a 9”x13” pan that I’d lined with parchment so that I could lift the fudge out later to cut it into pieces. Then I made a chocolate/butter glaze, and spread it over the top. Much, much easier and faster than making these into peanut butter balls! Thus the title of the blog post. Well, I suppose it should more accurately have been “cubing the sphere,” but that’s not really a saying, is it?
Anyway, here’s the recipe: it’s like Reese’s peanut butter cups only MUCH better.
Peanut Butter Balls-Squared
INGREDIENTS
For the peanut butter fudge:
2 cups peanut butter (not natural)* [566 g]
5 1/2 cups powdered sugar [622 g]
12 Tbsp melted butter [168 g]**
For the chocolate glaze:
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips [170 g]
6 Tbsp butter [84 g]
DIRECTIONS
For the peanut butter fudge:
Add the melted butter, peanut butter, and salt (if adding) to a stand mixer bowl and mix on low speed, until the butter is mostly incorporated. Then mix on medium speed until smooth. Add the powdered sugar and mix until fully incorporated and the mixture is no longer in small clumps but in a solid mass. Press mixture into a 9x13” pan and put into the fridge.***
For the chocolate glaze:
Melt the chocolate chips and butter together and stir until smooth. Let stand for five minutes. Then take the fudge out of the fridge, and spread the chocolate glaze over it. Return to the fridge until glaze has solidified. Let the mixture come to room temperature before attempting to cut it, or the chocolate glaze will crack and break and you will cry. Keep refrigerated; these should last about a week in an airtight container in the fridge.
NOTES
*natural peanut butter will not work in this recipe; it requires the hydrogenated (solid at room temperature) stuff
**if using unsalted butter, add a heaping 1/4 tsp of salt
***if you want your fudge to lift out of the pan so you can cut it on a cutting board, line the pan with parchment paper, leaving enough overhang to get a hold of later for lifting
