Chocolate Peanut Butter Balls

 Love these. L.O.V.E. Seriously. And guess what, they have one major similarity with everything else I have been doing lately, they are super easy. No kidding. People who think that I am being super lazy this holiday season should redirect to this post J .

So, what do you need?

1 cup peanut butter

½ cup marshmallow fluff

2/3 cup rice krispies

1 ½ cups chocolate chips

2 TBSP shortening

To begin, mix the peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, and rice krispies. Yum. Try not to stick your fingers in there too many times.

 Next, melt the chocolate chips and shortening in the microwave.

 Stir frequently. Melted chocolate should be relatively thin for this recipe so that it coats the peanut butter balls fairly easily.

Finally, roll the peanut butter mixture into 1” balls between your palms. Be careful, the most important part of this recipe is keeping the balls bite sized. No need to waste energy on multiple bites. Dip the balls into the chocolate until thoroughly coated.

Place on wax paper on a cookie sheet and refrigerate until chocolate has hardened. These may be frozen until you are ready to use them. If there are any left to freeze.

Total time it took me to make these…less than it took to write this post. Seriously, about 20 minutes, start to finish. Go, run, make your own!

Super Easy Christmas Candy

This candy is SO EASY to make, I am almost embarrassed to blog about it. However, it has become a Holiday staple for me, so I feel it should be included. I make this start to finish in about an hour. There are so many different options for it, you really can be creative and do whatever you like.

First, I melt 6 – 8 oz of candy. For demonstration purposes, I started with ivory bark. I add 1 TBSP of shortening and melt it in the microwave, stirring frequently.

 To that, I added ¼ cup of chopped ( I used my food processor) oreos.

 Stir well. I then spread the mixture on to a wax paper covered jelly roll pan. I sprinkle  a few remaining oreo crumbs on top and refrigerate until firm.

As I mentioned above, there are a ton of options for this. I also make a version with mint extract and candy canes, and with mint extract, green food coloring, and chopped Andes mints on the top. 

It really doesn’t get any easier than this! When the candy is firm, I take it out, break it into shards and freeze it in Ziploc bags until I need it.

I’m on a roll today, so I’m off to continue my candy making madness.

Easy Chicken Dumpling Soup

I know that we are all in the Christmas spirit and chicken dumpling soup sounds strangely out of place with all that holiday cheer, however, I have had a sick husband the past couple of days so I quickly (as quickly as you can make chicken soup) stirred up a pot for myself and the Grinch. Not to mention that I don’t need much of an excuse to make this soup, it’s one of our favorites.


Soup Ingredients:

1 whole chicken

2lbs carrots - chopped

3 large celery stalks -chopped

1 onion, diced

Chicken stock

Seasoning

To start out, I thawed a 4lb chicken in cold water in the sink. After removing the innards (please don’t forget to do this! If my sister Olivia is reading this, this advice is for you) I placed the chicken into a stock pot 2/3 full of boiling water. I added a TBSP of Herbs de Provence to the pot and boiled the chicken for 30 minutes.


When the chicken had cooked, I removed it from the pot with tongs and placed it on a platter. I added the carrots, onions, and celery. Next I added 3 TBSP chicken stock and a healthy dose of garlic salt.

I proceeded to boil the veggies in the stock while picking the chicken clean. After I had added all of the chicken to the pot, I boiled the soup until the carrots had begun to soften. Nobody likes mushy carrots, so I try to catch them before they get to that point. When the soup is theoretically done, you will want to check the seasoning. You may need to add more garlic salt or chicken stock to taste.

Into all this yummy goodness, we must add dumplings. No chicken soup is complete without them. My husband is totally the dumpling maker in our family, but as I mentioned, he was sick so it was up to me. I persuaded him to give up the recipe and I must say, I think I got it right the first time. Ten points for me.

Dumpling Ingredients:

1 egg

1 cup all purpose flour

¼ cup cold water



First I added the flour to the egg and stirred it together with a fork (apparently using a fork is important because I started out with a whisk and got told). Then add the water and mix it all together. When it is the consistency of oatmeal, maybe a little thicker, drop it by the forkful into the pot of boiling soup (soup should be brought to a rolling boil prior to dropping in dumplings). Add a lid to the pot and let them cook for 10 minutes or so. I will confess that I had to double the batch of dumplings…there are just never enough to go around!

So, I am off now to enjoy this wonderful soup du jour, alone, on my couch, while my husband is quarantined. How about you guys? Made any delicious soups lately? Battling any gross bugs? Any good ideas for disinfecting? Let me know, I’d love to hear from you!

The Good Life :)

I really have been trying to update my new blog regularly. Since it’s still just an infant, I would love to be able to post daily until it develops some kind of theme! As you probably figured out by now, I’m just hoping that it will do that on its own. But, if it does continue to be all over the place, it’s just following in my mental thought patterns footsteps, so it’s all good.

Anyway, for a quick explanation of why I haven’t been blogging regularly, here are some photos of what is currently occupying my time.

They look so innocent when it's just one....however there are ten!

6 weeks old today! I can’t believe how fast the time has gone. I also can’t believe how fortunate I am that 9 out of 10 of them are sold. Thank the heavens.

One more, just because I know you can’t get enough. I can’t get enough and I live with them.

So, my goal is to keep going as much as I can and after these babies are gone (sniff, sniff) in a few weeks, I’ll have even more time on my hands right? Right. That’s what I am going with anyway. Hope you are all having a great Tuesday. Anyone else have any cute puppy pictures to share? Stories from raising a litter? Fill me, I’d love to hear from you!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pucks

In my holiday baking madness, I have decided this year to try several new recipes. The first one I decide to experiment with was Chocolate Peanut Butter Pucks. I cannot even explain to you how insanely easy these are to make. I got the recipe from the Joy of Baking and tweaked it just a little bit.

First, I softened ½ cup peanut butter and 2 TBSP butter in the microwave, then mixed them together.

Next, I mixed in ½ cup powdered sugar and ½ a crushed up graham cracker. In hindsight, I could have crushed the whole graham cracker. I mixed that up well and left it sit.

Then, I chunked up 18 oz of chocolate, milk and semi sweet. I added 1 TBSP (a big spoonful) of shortening and melted that in the microwave. My microwave has a “melt chocolate” setting; thank you Samsung, but if yours does not, I would stir it every 30 seconds or so.

To make the cups, I added muffin cups to my cupcake tins, I did 24.

I ladled a spoonful of chocolate into each tin and coated the bottom of the muffin cup.

Then I dropped a ½ spoonful of the peanut butter mixture into the cups (This might also be the spot where I sampled the peanut butter mixture).

Finally, drop the remaining chocolate over the peanut butter into the cups. I may have used a little too much chocolate on the bottoms, as I did not have enough to fill all 24 cups, I only managed 21.

Finally, place the pans into the fridge until they firm up.

Pure deliciousness.

I froze mine in their paper cups for holiday parties.

 Here is the recipe.

Combine ½ cup peanut butter with 2 tbsp softened butter. Add ½ cup powdered sugar and 1 crumbled graham cracker. Set aside.

Melt 18 oz. chocolate ( I mixed semi sweet and milk chocolate) in a microwaveable bowl with 1 TBSP shortening until smooth. Stir at least every 30 seconds, if the chocolate becomes sticky, add 1 TBSP honey to thin.

Line 24 cupcake tins with muffin liners. Add ½ spoonful of chocolate to each liner. Smooth around to cover the bottom of the liner. Drop in 1 spoonful peanut butter mixture to each liner. Use remaining chocolate to cover the peanut butter.

Place pans in the refrigerator until firm. Freeze or serve!

So, other than my super holiday sweet obsession lately, I’ve been so busy getting ready for Christmas? How about you? Anyone all ready for Christmas? Anyone else on a food kick? I’d love to hear from you!

I linked to a few Monday parties, show them some love!

Bringing in the Holiday Spirit

I found an awesome holiday wreath here at The Southern Summer. I thought she did such a great job with hers that I would try to make one too.

I was lucky enough to score a wreath form for .99 cents at Goodwill. I also picked up some red yarn from Wal Mart.

Super simple steps here, if I can do it, so can you! I started by wrapping the wreath tightly with yarn.

It took quite awhile, I  had Harry, Ron and Hermione on ABCFamily’s 25 days of Christmas to keep me company.

I finally managed to wrap the whole wreath one time over. It looked a bit shabby.

There were gaps in the back, not good enough for me, and I'm not even close to a perfectionist. 

So, I wrapped it again (By this time we were almost done with The Chamber of Secrets).

With a much better result after the second layer of yarn, I continued. I had some snowflake ornaments (actually I have hundreds) left over from our wedding, so I grabbed a few of those and a few fuzzy red accent balls I also had from the wedding. I believe I got those from JoAnn Fabric in the floral department for pennies. I love reusing things I already have laying around! Makes me feel super crafty, which is ridiculous. I also purchased two large silver bells from the Dollar Tree the other day (score!) and a red and silver wire edged ribbon I also grabbed from there.  I used the ribbon to hang both the wreath and the bells and glued on the accents.

Here it is hanging on the door, 

Not sure if I love the bells? Is it too much? They would be super easy to remove. The verdict is still out, we’ll see. Other than that dilemma, I love the wreath. I think it turned out even better than I expected and it was very easy. I think that I will easily be able to change it up for next year too.

My first Christmas craft of the year has made me pretty happy. I can’t wait to move on to the next one. So, what do you think? Bells or no bells? Been working on any crafts of your own lately? I’d love to hear about them!

I've linked to a few online parties...check them out!