The Secret of Peanut Butter Eggs

One of the continuing kitchen pleasures for me is the challenge of doing things from scratch. And I've noticed that our classes in cheese-making and artisan bread baking are more popular then ever. Maybe it's the recession, maybe it's awareness about our compromised food choices, but people are very interested in knowing what goes into what they eat these days or just how to do things for themselves.

Working with chocolate falls into this category. Every year, I vow to skip making the candy eggs around Easter, and every year I cave. The commercial peanut butter eggs are just re-configured peanut butter cups: they just change the shape at the factory, wrap 'em in pastel paper, and ship 'em out. When we were kids, my mother would order homemade peanut butter and coconut eggs from the local UCC church. Church lady Easter eggs! Always dark chocolate, with a little sprinkling of finely crushed peanuts on top of the PB eggs to distinguish them from the coconut eggs. (Some people seem to loathe coconut - "it's the texture". These are the same people who devour flotillas of maki-nori at the sushi restaurants.)



Fast forward about 20 years and 300 miles from home. Finally, after one Reese's inferior pb egg too many, I got the craving for the real thing, had to duplicate the churchy eggs. My first attempts were okay - good texture, good chocolate, JIF premium, forming and drying the centers overnight, etc. But the taste was...meh. It was definitely the filling - the peanut butter just wasn't right. And it wasn't just the taste, but "the texture". A confirmed JIF fan, I reluctantly tried the rival brand, Skippy, and was somewhat relieved at the resulting similar result. Okay, maybe it was all those fillers and added sugar; my next attempt was with homemade peanut butter. What a disaster! The oil separated after enrobing in the chocolate, oozing out of the microscopic chocolate pores like some kind of hemorrhagic fever had struck. They were too gross to even think about eating. Exit - compost heap.

Okay, once more unto the breach, but this was gonna be the last time. The money spent trying to perfect the damn things, I could've bought a Fabrege egg. At a disreputable convenience store, I purchased the cheapest, dustiest, no-name jar of PB out there at a disreputable convenience stor and, lo! Success! The secret was non-premium pb, the kind you wouldn't want to eat straight because of it's dry, grainy, overly-peanutty taste. But those qualities of texture and taste were perfect for the eggs.

And so, the code broken, I continued to make the eggs, along with their coconut counterparts. I didn't make them every year, but often enough to gather a following of pb egg addicts. Namely, my husband, my parents, and my kid sister. This year, the folks are watching their weight and Chuck begged me not to put temptation in his path. So I'm sending them to my sister, who's always biking and hiking and doing other calorie-burning things. I think they call those things "exercise". Hey, pb is a great protein and dark chocolate is practically a health food, so they work as part of a healthy lifestyle regime. Or at least, I think that's what she will tell herself - I certainly do.