Ball Week! - Day 2: Peanut Butter & Peanut Butter Pretzel Balls

Welcome to day 2 of Ball Week!!!  On Day 2, you get a pair of balls.  You're welcome.

I should have apologized yesterday for all the inappropriate innuendo that will be appearing on the blog this week, but when you talk about balls for a full week it can't be helped.  Consider yourself warned.

These two balls are so similar that I decided to write about them in the same post.  They both have exactly the same ingredients except the the pretzel version has pretzels (surprise!) and a little salt added to the mix.

Can we talk about peanut butter for a second?

I love peanut butter, especially in desserts.  Peanut butter cookies are one of my favorites.  Add chocolate to peanut butter and holy goodness.  You know those peanut butter cookies with the chocolate kisses on them?  YUM.  I will eat them until I'm sick.

So, for the regular peanut butter balls, you mix peanut butter, butter, brown sugar and powdered sugar together and then roll it into balls.

Of all the balls I made during this extravaganza, these rolled up the best.  The balls were smooth and I had no issues getting the mixture to stick together.

The peanut butter balls gets dipped in chocolate and you're done, these were some of the easiest balls today.

I'm just ignoring the inappropriate ball statements now.  I can't avoid them.

So, that's the regular Peanut Butter Ball.  Now on to the pretzel version.

For this version, I crushed up some pretzels to add the mixture of peanut butter, butter, brown sugar and powdered sugar.

This made the mixture have that great combination of sweet and salty.  Mmmm, salty balls.

Don't judge me, I warned you.  Do you remember that SNL skit with Alec Baldwin and the Schweddy balls?  It's one of my favorites and I can assure you that Pete Schweddy would absolutely love these balls.

This recipe had a smaller ratio of powdered sugar in it than the recipe for the regular peanut butter balls did.  That, I believe, is what made the dough harder to roll.

They also didn't hold their shape quite as well when dipped in the chocolate, even after chilling the dough in the refrigerator for an hour or so.  They ended up being more like ovals and tended to stick to the fork as they were being dipped.

Next time I make these I'll probably triple the powdered sugar.

Nearly everyone at the tasting had a hard time deciding between the regular and pretzel versions except the groom.  He quickly voted for the regular peanut butter balls and they will be making an appearance at the wedding.  The groom gets to pick a few things for the wedding right?

My friend Squirrel on the other hand was firmly in the pretzel corner.  (No, her real name is not Squirrel, that's her code name but we do sometimes call her that in real life).  BTW, I just googled "do squirrels like pretzels?" and you wouldn't believe the number of You Tube videos showing squirrels eating pretzels.  One squirrel ate pretzels in a stroller and another stole a pretzel right out of some kid's hand.  So, the answer is yes.  Squirrels like pretzels.

My opinion?  I like that the regular PB balls held their shape so well, but I liked the flavor of the pretzel version better.  In the future I would probably just add crushed pretzels to the regular PB recipe.

Here are links to the recipes I used:
Peanut Butter Balls
Pretzel Peanut Butter Balls

So, we've got one ball selected for the wedding... three more to go.

Julie