Secret Recipe Club--Peanut Butter Pretzel Truffles

This month I had Oh! You Cook for Secret Recipe Club. I wasn't planning to make a dessert. I was intrigued by several posts Dena had about artists favorite foods--like this Georgia O'Keefe watercress soup. And I'd even purchased leeks to make a nice healthy potato leek soup (Claude Monet, in case you were wondering). And then evilness happened. Or, well, the weekend when I was all set to make my nice healthy soup, I didn't want nice healthy soup. I wanted, well, the truth is that I wanted cookies. So I went back to Dena's blog to scour around for cookies and I found this.

They weren't quite cookies, but I was pretty sure they would hit the spot and then some. Also, I had a half-used bag of pretzels languishing in my pantry. I felt it was my duty to use them up--food waste being a sin and all. So I made these and they were utterly fantastic and you should make them too.

Additionally, they're easy to do and with Easter coming they could easily be shaped into little darling eggs. Some of mine came out pretty egg-shaped without even trying. But we didn't wait till Easter to eat them.

Peanut Butter Pretzel Truffles
adapted from Oh! You Cook
Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 30 minutes
Cost: $2.10
pretzels: .30, peanut butter: .50, chocolate chips: 1.00, sugars: .25, butter: .05

1 1/4 C pretzels
1/2 C creamy peanut butter
1 Tbl. unsalted butter, room temperature
2 Tbl. brown sugar
3 Tbl. confectioners' (powdered) sugar
1-2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Put your pretzels in a large Ziploc bag, then roll them with a rolling pin. My kids thought this was awesome. You'll have 1/3-1/2 C crushed pretzels--you want them crushed to small pieces, but not to powder (thus you might want to avoid the food processor this time). Set these aside.

In a small bowl, mix peanut butter, butter, brown sugar and confectioners' sugar, stirring until blended and as smooth as possible. 

Reserve 1 Tbsp of the crushed pretzels. Then add the rest to the peanut butter mixture and mix.

Roll these into balls. I put my dough into the freezer for 20 minutes or so, so they were easier to roll. 

After they're rolled, melt your chocolate. I did this in the microwave in 20 second intervals. When it's melted, you can either dip the peanut butter pretzel balls in, but that sounded hard and messy to me and I'm shamelessly lazy. So I put my balls on parchment paper and simply plopped chocolate onto them. This meant their bottoms didn't get covered, but we didn't mind (although having a fully covered chocolate give you that satisfying crack of the chocolate shell when you bite into them...)

Then sprinkle with remaining pretzel crumbles.

Allow chocolate to harden. We did this in the freezer for about 20 more minutes. You can also do the fridge, or--if you have the patience of Job--just leave them on the counter for several hours. 

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