Chocolate Blobbers! Yummy yummy!

Hello Internet!  Today I am going to teach you one of my secret family recipes!  I know - it's time to get excited!  Our food-craft for the day is Chocolate Blobbers.  Let's get started shall we?

**I forgot to mention - this recipe came into our family via my dear Aunt Becky!**

Here is what you will need:

 That is, one box of Cap'n Crunch Peanut Butter, Rice Krispies (you can use store brand, that is ok), one package of chocolate bark, and one can of Spanish peanuts (aka red-skinned peanuts). I'm pretty sure it's fine to use regular old peanuts, but who wants to take that risk!

The first step is to melt your whole package of chocolate bark in a nice big pot. Stir it occasionally, and don't turn your burner on too high or you'll scald your chocolate.  That wouldn't be good. 

 While it is melting, measure yourself out two cups of each of your cereals.  That's 2 cups of Cap'n crunch, and 2 cups of Krispies.  Not 2 cups of cereal total. (Don't use Total cereal for this recipe - it would probably get soggy.)

 You might as well go ahead and open up your can of peanuts now too.

 Then Voila!  Your chocolate is all melted! Actually, I'm not sure if I should really call it chocolate, since the package calls it "chocolate flavored coating".  It does have cocoa in it though, so that's good enough for me.

 Once it is melted, dump both cereals in it and the whole can of peanuts.

 If you're like me and peanut butter crunch is your favorite, go ahead and add a little extra.

 Then stir it up until everything in your pot looks well coated.

 Oh - I should mention here, you should line a few cookie sheets with waxed paper at the beginning of this process, because now you want to scoop globs of chocolate cereal/peanut mixture onto your wax-paper-lined cookie sheet.  Just make them good snack sized.  My sizing always depends on what spoon I'm using.

Once your cookie sheet is full, stick it into your fridge wherever you have room.  You can probably tell from this photo that my fridge was not prepared for the amount of chocolate blobbers it was going to have to accomodate.

 Then once they have hardened up, take them out of the fridge and chow down!  Yum!

That's it - super easy and quick!  I'm pretty sure this would work well with whatever cereal you want to use, but I like 'em this way, so I've never seen a reason to change.  My family's preferred method of storage is gallon zip-loc bags.  This one is a big favorite with my people, so I'm guessing yours will like it too!!  Enjoy!

Wordless Wednesday - Pastrami!

 

A focus on the crafts of others: Stephen's homemade pickles!

Last month my husband decided to make pickles!  We tried to grow some cucumbers in the garden for pickles but all we ever got were a couple of sad little cucumbers.  They were even curved in little frowns...  Lucky for Stephen, he found the perfect little pickle sized cucumbers at the farmers market! 

First he whipped up a batch of pickling spice.  The recipe came from the book, Charcuterie, and it is full of all sorts of exciting stuff, or at least he thought so, because for weeks after he made them he'd come up to me like this once or twice a day:

What a goober...

Sorry honey, but I don't find your spices all that interesting...

Then he stuffed the cucumbers and spices in a couple of jars with some water and vinegar and other stuff and stuck them in the fridge.  Our fridge pickles would be ready in about 2 weeks.

All done!

Take a look at those lovely pickles! 

Now Stephen is such a happy boy!  He loves homemade pickles. In fact, he likes to tell me sometimes how one time he ate so many of his grandma's homemade pickles that he threw up.  Gross...

"Yay!  I love pickles!"

I, on the other hand, hate pickles. No, I don't hate pickles, I HATE pickles.  There are few things that I think are more disgusting than pickles. In fact, maybe there is nothing I think is more disgusting than pickles.  However, Stephen really wanted me to try one.  Since he is my husband, and I love him, I told him I'd try one bite, but he had to record my genuine reactions.  I like to keep this blog real you know.  So here's what happened...

You know, it wasn't the worst pickle I've ever had...

"Whatever!  More for me!!"

Not Reese's Fancy Peanut Butter Cups

Sometimes my crafts aren't fabric/bead/decoration crafts.  Sometimes they are food crafts!  Today's post is a food craft.  I'll start with a little bit about my "kitchen self".   I really don't care for cooking.  When I lived alone I ate a lot of fast food and things out of boxes.  My specialty dinners are grilled cheese and fried egg sandwiches, which I would make a lot because they took all of 5 minutes to prepare.  I also made a lot of ground beef + dishes (as in ground beef plus 2 or 3 other things).  I hate making things that use more than one pan because I hate doing dishes.  That being said, I like baking, which usually uses tons of dishes, so that doesn't really make sense, but there you have it!  I'm way more interested in making desserts and things that really have no nutritional purpose than in making things that will keep me alive and healthy(ish).  I pretty much only save recipes for sweets.  Like this one: home made peanut butter cups!

I love Reese's peanut butter cups.  Especially the eggs that come out at Easter, and the other shapes that come out at other holidays.  I'm all about the peanut butter in these things - I eat off as much of the chocolate as I can before I actually take a bite into them.  Stephen is all about the whole chocolate peanut butter experience though.  When I showed him this recipe he of course wanted to make them, but dark-chocolate style (so did I!)  So we went to the store and bought some fancy dark chocolate, peanut butter and powdered sugar - this recipe is super basic and open for lots of variation BTW!

We decided to make ours mini-cups instead of the giant cups found on the instructables page.  I was thinking if they turned out to be easy and good, then I would make some for a party at work.  As it turns out, they aren't hard at all, but very time consuming.  And they are good, but they ain't Reeses.  I decided to scrap the idea of making enough for work and we just enjoyed the ones we made all by ourselves.  I didn't take a lot of photos for this one (my hands got really messy!) but here are a few:

Here are my dozen cups filled with peanut butter and getting their chocolate top.

Done! Fresh out of the fridge and ready to taste!

And here's a really blurry one of the inside of a cup.

My final thoughts on this project? These did turn out pretty good, but we used super dark chocolate so they definitely tasted like "fancy food" which Reese's is not.  I also think I put too much chocolate and not enough peanut butter.  I ALSO think that this batch would have turned out better if we'd opted to do giant cups instead of these little ones, because more peanut butter would have been in them (but as you recall, I'm all about the peanut butter). So, with a little tweaking I think these could be great, and I'd probably make them again some day, but it's questionable whether they would ever be as good as real Reese's, which aren't that expensive, and a heck of a lot easier to get your hands on.