1/4 lb. butter, softened
8 oz. cream cheese, softened
2 lb. confectioners' sugar
1-1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. salt
12 oz. milk chocolate candy melts, milk chocolate coating chocolate, or milk chocolate chips
To prepare the candy, you just mix the butter and cream cheese together. Add the confectioners' sugar and mix well. Add the vanilla and salt and mix until well-blended. Place the mixture in the refrigerator to chill for an hour or so. Form the peanut butter mixture into egg shapes (or whatever shape suits your fancy), then refrigerate again overnight. Melt the chocolate in a microwave oven or in a double boiler. Using a fork, roll the egg in the melted chocolate. Arrange the chocolate coated eggs on a waxed paper lined tray and allow the chocolate to harden.
You can make a variety of flavors. To make peanut butter, add 1 1/2 c. peanut butter to the wet ingredients. For chocolate (which is extreme chocolate), add 1 c. cocoa powder. Coconut ended up being my favorite flavor. All you add is 15 oz. of bagged shredded coconut.
As if this wasn't enough yummy mess, I have been reading a blog called Bakerella lately and decided to try out some of her crafty treats! Bakerella's Cake Pops are really awesome...mine, not so much! I didn't even take pictures of the bad ones because they were so awful. Basically I made the eggs too big for the pops and they wouldn't stay on. There were a lot of slow painful cake pop deaths as the pops started out looking good and slowly slid down the lollipop stick. I re-balled several of the pops and those did work slightly better. At that point, however, I was so sick of the pops I gave up and just dipped them in white chocolate. They are DELICIOUS though and I am going to attempt cake pops again in the future...next time I will be smart and follow the directions!Here are the cake balls:
And here are some of the cake pops that survived the disaster!
One thing I did that Bakerella didn't have on her website (and was actually Rachael's idea), was to put the baked cake in a big ziploc freezer bag with the can of frosting. All I had to do was mush it up and then cut the bag open to form the balls. I also noticed that chilling the dough seemed to make it a lot easier too!
