No-Bake Christmas Goodies

Can you believe it!? I’m officially on “Christmas Break.”  I thought last year was my last year for such a concept, but I managed to pull it off again even with a real grown-up job. Most of the credit has to go to my boss for closing the office for all of next week, but hey, I’ll take it.

Despite being on break Brandon and I have a pretty busy week full of holiday festivities traveling to each of our hometowns, and I didn’t want to walk into our hosts’ homes empty handed (although our “hosts” are our parents, and I think they would let us in anyway, but still) so I spent last Sunday making some awesome truffles.

I knew I had to go the no-bake route because of our quarantined-mouse-poop-filled oven, so these truffles were the way to go…plus they are just so pretty.

Even though they are no-bake it wasn’t necessarily a quick-make, so if you do it, make sure you have a couple hours to spend.

So, without further ado, here’s what I did: (you could also get the recipe here here, but my pictures are more fun…)

let the cream cheese sit out for a while to soften and then slowly mix in the powdered sugar

Melt the chocolate chips and mix that in, too.

Keep mixing until there are no more white streaks. Then cover it up and put it in the fridge for an hour.

So now you have an hour to kill before you can do anything else, what do I suggest you do?

Make peanut butter truffles, of course!

I found this recipe here, (but again, I have fun pictures) Before you start, the recipe says to cover a baking sheet (or 2) with wax paper and put it in the freezer first.

Mix up all this peanut-buttery goodness. I started out using a spatula and then found it more fun easier to just mix it up with my hands.

Get your frozen baking sheets and roll the peanut butter dough into small balls.

Put those puppies in the freezer for a little bit and since we’re being so efficient with our “chill time” its now time to get out the other chocolate truffle dough and roll that up into small balls.

Once those are all rolled its time to beautify them! I chose an array of toppings to decorate them:

Roll the balls in whatever kind of topping you want and voila! lovely little truffles! I got little paper cups at Michael’s to finish off the presentation.

How pretty. But wait! The truffle making madness isn’t over quite yet, (although to be honest, I was getting ready for it to be done by now). We still have to finish up the peanut butter truffles.

When I pulled the Peanut Butter balls out of the freezer I realized that I was a little heavy handed on my ball making skills for this one, especially compared to the chocolate truffles, but since they were frozen I couldn’t break them apart very well and reroll them into smaller balls, so I cut them in half and made them more like peanut butter mounds rather than truffles. Problem solved. This was also a good idea because although the chocolate truffles are way better looking, the peanut butter mounds were definitely the crowd-pleaser. I must admit, I’ve made the chocolate truffles before and they do taste good, but they are super rich and I really only like making them for their looks. Haha, perhaps I can be a bit superficial when it comes to truffles.

But back to the Peanut Butter goodies, I melted dark chocolate candy melts in a bowl and spooned it over each mound to finish them off.

Not as pretty, but super tasty!

The crushed graham cracker is what makes these little guys so tasty; adds a little unexpected crunch to the peanut butter.

So there are my no-bake goodies! In the mean time, we did get a new oven! Real baking can finally ensue! I hope everyone has a very merry holiday weekend, and come back soon!