Lots of baking!

We did a lot of baking at our house this weekend. Some were successes and some were failures. I woke up Saturday to the smell of these baking downstairs:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Lemon coconut muffins! They were from Gluten-free Baking Classics by Annalise Roberts. I've made a few things out of this cookbook and I am really loving it. We had done a little research on the best gluten-free baking cookbook out there and this one seemed to be the winner.

I know several of you read Fly Through Our Window (one of my favorites blogs!) and you may have seen the post last week where she made peppermint patties. Her pictures made them look awesome, and we were supposed to take a dessert to a Super Bowl party last night so I thought these would be perfect (and naturally gluten-free!) THEY WERE AWFUL. Truly disgusting. So I thought I'd let you learn from our experience in case you were also tempted to make them. Peppermint extract and mint extract are not the same thing. Our mint extract turned out to be spearmint, which has the flavoring of gum, or toothpaste. And when you are making something with the exact same consistency as toothpaste, it.is.not.good. But, we kept going. We tried to melt the chocolate in a double-boiler but it wasn't melting well so we added milk. Big mistake. Now we had ganache, which doesn't harden. At all. So with 2 hours to go before the game, we had messy, drippy chocolate covered toothpaste. They went in the trash. I'm sure these would be very good if made correctly.

Fail!

Instead, we made chocolate peanut butter balls, which were easy and turned out great!

Here is the recipe…

Chocolate Peanut Butter Balls

1/2 cup unsalted butter

18 oz smooth peanut butter

3 1/2 cups powdered sugar

2 1/2 cups rice krispies (I used a gluten-free brand)

16 oz semisweet chocolate chips (we used half milk chocolate chips, and we added a little shortening)

Mix butter, peanut butter, and sugar until creamy. Add cereal and mix until combined. Chill until cold. Form 1-inch balls and refrigerate 12 hours (we just put them in the freezer for about an hour). Melt chocolate in a double boiler. Dip balls in warm chocolate. Cool on wax paper and then refrigerate until chocolate hardens.