Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Balls

I’ve been making Good Mom and Bad Mom jokes to the Wendy’s Eating Husband (WEH). They sound something like this (with one Good Mom and one Bad Mom example):

“I’m a good mom today because I watercolor painted with the girls for a whole hour!”

“I’m a bad mom today because I ignored my kids for fifteen minutes while I junked on Facebook.”

I entertained myself with these mom jokes when I had the WEH as my audience. I thought I was funny, but he did not. He let me know one Sunday morning before church. I made a Bad Mom joke when the kids wouldn’t let me unbuckle them from their car seats.

“I’m a bad mom because the kids don’t want me to unbuckle them from their car seats!”

“Would you knock that off?” he said.

I got in trouble. I hate getting in trouble with the WEH because he’s always right. He needs to work on a healthy diet, but I need to work on a healthy mindset.

I am quick to crack the jokes because the days where I make mom mistakes, I don’t just feel like a bad mom…I feel like the worst mom in the world. Making homemade peanut butter balls for my girls earns me shiny stickers on the Rockstar Mom Behavior Chart, and in this dysfunctional system, it helps to hide what’s really at the bottom of it all: I feel like a loser mom and I’m trying to make up for it because I can’t get over my mistakes.

A good mom owns her mistakes, forgives herself for them, and then moves on. She sees her flaws and chooses to love herself anyway. A good mom models this process for her kids, because she wants her kids to grow up and love themselves, too.

Moms and everyone else: you are not a loser because you make mistakes. You’re human. Humans make mistakes.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about the peanut butter balls.

I’m tempted to say, “these are the healthiest peanut butter balls you’ll ever find on the internet”, but everyone has their own definition of what “healthy” means. Everyone claims that their peanut butter balls are “healthy”. Mine are healthy because they are:

• organic
• whole foods based
• low in sugar molecules
• vegan
• high in protein

The dark chocolate isn’t perfectly a 100% whole food because it has sugar in it. I could go on about how I used to strictly avoid sugar 250%, but I’ll save my sugar OCD for another post. I’ve made peace with the organic sugar in my organic, 85% dark chocolate because the only other sweeteners in the recipe are stevia and 1 whopping Tablespoon of honey.

The recipe uses one and a half 3.5 ounce organic Green and Black’s chocolate bars. That is 5.25 ounces of chocolate with 30 grams of sugar, which is divided among 63 one-inch balls. The honey adds another 0.25 sugar grams per ball, and the peanut butter contributes 0.38 sugar grams per ball. A tally of the sugar from the organic dark chocolate, honey, and natural peanut butter comes to 2.7 grams of sugar per chocolate covered peanut butter ball.

To realize the significance of this, think of how much sugar is in one Reese’s peanut butter cup. It has 10 grams. You could eat 4 of my chocolate covered peanut butter balls, and ring up just under 11 grams in the sugar bank. And because these chocolate covered peanut butter balls have white beans and virgin coconut oil in them, those 10 grams shouldn’t tank your pancreas like a Reese’s peanut butter cup.

Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Balls

Ingredients

• 1 batch of Vegan Peanut Butter Fudge
• 5.25 ounces of 85% dark organic chocolate (or 1.5 Green & Black Cocoa Bars)

Makes about 63 one inch diameter balls

1. Make one batch of Vegan Peanut Butter Fudge. Instead of pressing it into a glass Pyrex dish, transfer it from the stove top to a bowl. Refrigerate it for about 30 minutes to firm up the balls for rolling.
2. Roll fudge into 1 inch diameter balls and place on a cookie sheet.
3. Place rolled balls in the freezer for about an hour.
4. While peanut butter balls are freezing, melt 1.5 bars of Green & Black’s dark 85% Cacao Bar or 5.25 ounces of 85% dark organic chocolate in a double boiler. In place of a double boiler, I use a stainless steel bowl placed on top of a saucepan of gently boiling water. The chocolate goes in the stainless steel bowl. Make sure to keep stirring the chocolate and that the water below stays at a gentle, simmering boil. You don’t want the chocolate to be too hot and you may be able to turn off the boiling water for a few minutes.
5. Once peanut butter balls are frozen, pull them out of the freezer. With two spoons, dip them in the melted chocolate, roll until coated, pull them out with the spoons, letting excess chocolate drip, and then place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
6. Freeze until firm.
7. Store in the refrigerator.
8. Serve in mini cupcake liners.

Note: There is a sweet spot with the melted chocolate consistency. If it’s too runny, it will be too drippy. If it’s too hard, the spoons make marks on the balls.

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