They like me, they really like me!

...or at least they like my baking. I did my Christmas baking this week and made peanut butter balls and two different types of cake balls (french vanilla and milk chocolate with half dipped in chocolate and half dipped in vanilla). I had a lot of trouble with my baking this year; I'm not quite sure where I left my brain.

First the peanut butter balls. Simple recipe:
-1 1/2 cups of peanut butter
-1 stick of butter
-1 tsp of vanilla
-1 lb of powdered sugar
Heat the butter and peanut butter together over medium heat until melted. Take off the heat and stir in the vanilla. Here's where my first problem began. I forgot to check that I had vanilla before I started - which I did not. Okay so skip the vanilla; it won't mess up the flavor too much. Next pour the mixture over the powdered sugar in a bowl. And this is the big screw up. I had what I thought was half of a two pound bag of powdered sugar. I added it without properly measuring - total rookie mistake. Yeah there was way too much powdered sugar! So I mixed up another partial batch of the peanut butter/butter mixture and dumped it in...and had to do it again...and again. At this point I was out of peanut butter too but I was finally happy with the ratio. I did, however, have a lot more dough than I planned for. Now the instructions call for rolling the mixture into balls. Fortunately that was successful. I had to use more chocolate than expected but everything was dipped.

Next was the first set of cake balls. Made a German Chocolate cake but over stirred or something. I ended up with pieces of hard boiled egg whites in my cake. I had to toss that batch. I moved onto the next set of cake balls - french vanilla. Cake turned out okay but I had to revive it with extra frosting since I didn't get around to balling them right away and the cake started to dry out. The third was finally successful - chocolate cake. Then I moved on to dipping. The chocolate went fine, but I had clumpy vanilla for my first batch. Finally got it to stir smoothly on the second batch. Baking done!

I took everything I made and divided them up for my parents, E's parents, the office and a few for us to enjoy at home. I brought the office ones in today. I had an entire container full and an office of 25 people has managed to devour all but five of them! Hopefully the families like them that much.