The Peanut Butter Egg debacle

I hate peanut butter. I hate peanuts. I hate anything that has come into contact with peanut butter or peanuts.

It smells bad, it tastes bad. It's just bad.

I know, I know. You are astounded by the fact that anyone could hate peanut butter or peanuts. You've never heard of such a thing. I'm some kind of freak of nature.

Even so. I hate it.

But I married someone who happens to love peanut stuff, particularly peanut butter eggs at Easter. His mom used to make them each year when he was a kid, and since we now live 2,000 miles from our families, I realized years ago that this responsibility had fallen to me.

So once a year, I buy a jar of JIF and dig my hands into a big mound of peanut butter, powdered sugar, butter and milk to form the filling of the eggs.

Mike begins hovering almost as soon as the mixing begins. He throws around a lot of "How did you get to be so awesome?!" and "Ohhhhhh, lookin good!!"

Once the filling is formed into a couple dozen little egg shapes, they get frozen for an hour. And practically every peanut butter egg recipe I can find says something like the following:

"Dip eggs in chocolate, and place on wax paper to set."

Ok. But dip them HOW? My original recipe says to stick a toothpick in one end and dip into the melted chocolate. But I have experienced three issues with this:

1. Once the frozen eggs starts to unfreeze and get soft, they fall off the toothpick and into the chocolate. So, the first couple of eggs would dip ok, but by the 3rd or 4th, I would start to have problems.

2. The chocolate is so darned thick, and Mike doesn't like a ton of chocolate on his eggs. The filling is the main event, he says. You can't have too much chocolate. I would think he'd want a ton of chocolate to mask the gross peanut butter filling, but what do I know.

3. The toothpick leaves a dumb toothpick-size hole in one end.

I have tried freezing the eggs longer, to keep them harder. I have tried spooning chocolate onto the eggs (this doesn't give proper coverage).

I've even tried just throwing the darn things into the chocolate and pulling them back out (not pretty, and I ended up with chocolate fingers that got chocolate all over everything in my general vicinity).

This year, I went in search of paraffin. This waxy stuff gets melted in with the chocolate and is supposed to make it smoother and easier to work with, and has the added bonus of making the chocolate a little shiny. Very professional-looking.

I went to two stores and couldn't find the elusive paraffin. Sigh.

So desperate times called for additional improvisation. And I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner.

I mixed the filling, formed the eggs and froze them for an hour.


Then I took the eggs out ONE BY ONE (yes, I got chocolate on my freezer door, oops). I stuck a toothpick in them. I dipped them. I scraped off the excess thick chocolate with a spoon. I set them on wax paper.

I let them set for about 30 minutes, and then I removed the toothpicks and (here's the really genius part) I used a fingernail to spread a little extra chocolate over the toothpick hole. You'd never know it was ever there! Here I am, in action:

I know, you all probably thought of this years ago, but it was a major breakthrough for me.

I still have no idea how they taste (Mike seems to approve), but I think this is my best looking batch so far.

Here's the recipe, in case you want to attempt them:

Ingredients
* 2 cups powdered sugar
* 1 cup creamy peanut butter
* 1/4 cup butter
* 1 bag of milk chocolate chips
* Touch of milk, for moisture

Directions
* Combine powdered sugar, peanut butter, butter and milk (if needed for moisture) until blended. Shape mixture into several small eggs. Freeze for 1 hour.
* Place chocolate in top of double boiler. Melt over medium heat, stirring frequently until smooth. Using toothpicks, dip each egg into melted chocolate to cover, then lay on wax paper and allow to harden.

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