Everyone knows that one of the best combinations in the world is peanut butter and chocolate.  It’s just perfection.

Welling being a peanut allergy family we can’t eat that combination in our house and there are many times I crave it.  So much that I have been known to throw a handful of chocolate chips in to a bowl of soy nut butter and eat it.  Mostly because I’m too lazy to cook anything with the two or I forget about the chocolaty balls I make for Christmas every year that give me the taste of that perfect combination of peanut butter and chocolate, without using peanut butter of course.

Now once upon a time in my life these chocolate little balls contained peanut butter. I remember spending nearly every Christmas Eve rolling out hundreds of these balls until my hands ached. This job is now big kidlets, and bonus I realized that rolling the dough is very  good sensory input for him for his SPD.

This year I found out why my grandmother waited until Christmas Eve to make them, because if you make them any earlier they will not last until Christmas day.

So here’s how you make them..

You will need:

3 packages of Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Chips

about 6-9 tablespoons of  Vegetable Shortening

2 containers or Soy Nut Butter (sunflower seed butter will also work)

4 cups of powered sugar

2 sticks of butter or margerine at room temp

1 tsp of vanilla

Melt your butter, vanilla, and soy nut butter together in a microwave safe bowl for about 45 seconds or until smooth. Stir in the powder sugar. At some point you will need to knead the powder sugar into the soy nut butter mixture. Knead until you have a playdough like consistency. And then roll into balls, we like ours about nickle size around. After you have rolled balls for hours and your hands are numb and you’ve used all the dough up, place the in the fridge for a few hours or overnight.

To melt your chocolate put 2 1/2 bags of chocolate chips and the vegetable shortening in a double boiler until it’s melted. Stir constantly so it doesn’t stick and burn on the bottom of the pan. Lay out some wax paper on the counter, pull out the all ready rolled soy nut butter balls out of the fridge and get to dipping. Some people use a tooth pick to dip, I find that a small teaspoon works best for me. When your done you can put them back in the fridge so that the chocolate can harden.

Then eat and enjoy! That wasn’t hard now was it, and for different holidays you could experiment with different shapes. Hearts for Valentines Day, Eggs for Easter, Pumpkins for Halloween, the ideas are endless.