- Do you love Easter candy as much as I do?
Today we're making a homemade version
of Reese's peanut butter eggs.
These are so simple.
No baking, just a few ingredients and beyond delicious.
Hey, you're watching Preppy Kitchen
where I John Kanell teach you
how to make delicious homemade dishes
to share with your family and friends.
These peanut butter eggs
are gonna hop right into your mouth.
So let's get started.
First off, let's make that peanut butter filling.
It is so easy and delicious.
One cup of smooth peanut butter,
and when you're using peanut butter,
use one that is not the all natural separated out
if you can, because those ones will not mix as smoothly.
You kind of want the regular processed peanut butters
that have some palm oil and emulsifiers in them
and they're gonna give you a really nice smooth filling.
When Brian and I were growing up in separate households,
we would always have pretty crazy Easter baskets.
Our moms went all out.
So for the boys we are making a full Easter basket
that will include these chocolate peanut butter eggs.
I'm so excited to see their faces light up.
I will have to hide these where they can't find them.
Okay, one cup in and now we're gonna add in five tablespoons
of room temperature unsalted butter.
Normally I would say like,
"Okay, you could use salted butter"
but in this recipe you're gonna want to have unsalted
because that peanut butter is salty (giggles).
Plop that right in there, use your paddle attachment,
and we're gonna cream it up, pop it down
and we're going to mix it up.
Just cream it together. (mixer whirring)
That's already delicious.
One of my favorite snacks as a child was toast
with butter and then peanut butter on top.
That is the business.
So right now we're gonna scrape the bottom of the bowl down.
Whenever you're making a peanut butter filling,
it is so easy, however, the one thing that can mess you up
is if you do not scrape the bowl down,
you're gonna have like a thinner, smoother,
creamier layer on top with a thicker layer on the bottom
and that's not what you want.
So, scrape it down.
If you have a peanut allergy by the way,
you could totally do this with almond butter as well
or cashew butter, any nut butter will work pretty well.
Now it's time for the powdered sugar.
This does two things,
it sweetens it to make it delicious,
but it also stiffens it up
because this is pretty gloopy right now
like you can see this is not gonna be fun to roll,
will not hold its shape either.
So we're calling for two cups of powdered sugar,
but if you want you can reduce that a bit
or increase it a bit, it's partially to taste and to fill.
We have two cups of sugar in there.
Let's pop this down and mix.
Carefully, don't explode.
(mixer whirring)
So you mix it a bit and you're like,
"Oh my gosh, this is a crumbling mess, what's going on?"
Well, scrape that bowl down, everything will be okay.
See like, what is this, crumbles?
No, no, no, we want a nice smooth mixture.
But then you scrape down on the bottom,
it's like pure peanut butter and butter.
(upbeat music)
Okay, we scraped that bowl down.
I'm gonna add some vanilla and then see,
"Is two cups just right?"
Let's give it a try.
(mixer whirring) Turn it on,
add about a teaspoon.
So just be patient and let it come together.
That powdered sugar is very deceptive.
It's like, "Nothing's happening,
nothing's happening, it happened."
So it'll happen, just keep mixing.
(mixer whirring)
Okay, a little bit of mixing later.
If you see that your mixture is still a bit too crumbly,
you can add in some water
and it's kinda like making pastry dough by the way,
so here it's like,
"Oh, what are those, crumbles?"
But if you put it together,
it will form something you can mold.
This looks a tad bit dry,
so I'm gonna add in just a bit of water.
Various peanut butters will have various levels of moisture
so you can adjust accordingly.
when it on low, (mixer whirring)
then add in that water about a tablespoon at a time.
Note one tablespoon made all the difference.
(mixer whirring sharply)
We gonna work it up to medium now
just so it kinda comes together more
really slapping that peanut butter around.
(mixer whirring)
And now here we go.
This is perfect, it looks nice and smooth already
and when you feel it in your hands,
it's like silky play-dough.
Perfect, okay, we're ready to mold.
You'll wanna pinch off little bits of the dough.
I'm actually measuring them
and they're exactly 24 grams each, but that's me.
You can do whatever you want.
You can have big eggs, small eggs,
they could all be different sizes
or if you want them to be the same size,
you can use a scale or really eyeball it.
This is the size
of like I don't know, a nice marble (murmurs).
Anyways, roll it in your hands,
roll, roll, roll.
It should be forming like a nice
kind of like smooth ball in your hands.
If it's cracking a lot,
it needs another drop or two of water,
go ahead and mix it up, there is no shame in that game.
Anyway, roll roll, roll into a spherical shape.
Place it onto a baking sheet lined
with parchment paper or naked.
The parchment paper is just for easy cleanup,
so it's no worries if you don't wanna use it.
Smash it down with your hand.
Smash smash, smash.
It'll crack a little bit at the edges, but that's okay.
And then you're gonna manipulate it into an egg shape.
Does not have to be perfect
as it will be covered with chocolate.
But you know, you can finagle things a bit.
My fingers kinda like clip it into an egg shape on top.
And that one is ready to go.
As you move along,
just kind of place them some distance apart.
See as you squish it together in your hands,
it becomes a nice solid non-crumbly shape.
You're also warming the peanut butter and the butter up,
which helps it to be more malleable and less cracky.
This smells amazing by the way.
I actually love Reese's peanut butter cups,
my dad would bring one home every night
as a special treat when he came back from work,
maybe not every night,
but it seemed like almost every night.
So they bring back fond memories,
but making them from scratch is so easy
and even more delicious.
You really realize like,
"Oh, this tastes good, a little sugar
"and nice peanut butter."
So pat, pat, pat, pat, pat.
If you do have an egg-shaped cookie cutter, hooray,
this is gonna be so easy for you.
All you have to do
is get that whole batch of peanut butter filling,
roll it out, you can do it in between two pieces
of Parchment paper if you want.
Pop it into the fridge to set
and then cut those eggs out
and they'll be totally perfect and amazing.
But if you don't, we're doing it this way.
My eggs are all shaped up, I'm quite happy with them.
And as one final bit of advice,
if you're having a little bit of trouble,
you wanna do a little bit of final modeling,
wash your hands, you dirty animal, just kidding.
Wash your hands and then leave them a little bit dump.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
And that moisture will really help you smooth things out.
These already to go into the fridge to chill.
I'll be leaving them here for like an hour or two,
I'm gonna go make dinner,
do some dad stuff and when I come back,
it's time for the chocolate, the best part.
I'll be right back.
You're gonna use two cups of chocolate
and I'm using semi-sweet,
but you could use bittersweet.
you could use milk chocolate,
you could even use white chocolate
if you're a glutton for punishment.
White chocolate is not easy to melt and use for dipping.
I'm warning you in advance.
Okay, two cups.
(chocolate popping)
So you could just melt the chocolate,
but what we're gonna do is add in
just a hair's breadth under two tablespoons of coconut oil.
You could also use shortening,
I'm not living at shortening life though,
so it's a coconut oil for me.
These oils will basically let the chocolate be
a little bit more thin and melty and perfect for dipping.
So just drizzle that in and you have two options,
you could use a double boiler,
so place this over a small pot of simmering water
or you can pop it into the microwave,
which is what I'll be doing today.
If you're using a microwave,
remember it's short bursts of power, low power,
so I usually go to 50%, 30 seconds,
stir and repeat until it's almost all melted.
Don't try and melt all the chocolate
even if you're using a double boiler,
get it to be almost all melted and then take it off heat.
Stir a couple times and that residual heat
will complete the melting process.
Very important, otherwise your chocolate could burn.
All right, into the microwave.
Several 30 second bursts in the microwave later
at half power, it's all nice and melty.
I wanna point out just one more time
that when I took it out of the microwave the last time,
there was still tons of chunks of chocolate
that were not melted,
but, just a little bit of stirring and time did the trick.
That residual heat will finish the job for you.
Don't burn your chocolate.
Just want you to take a look.
Look at this, nice and silky, so perfect
and it could totally cool down a little bit.
You can let it come closer to room temperature for dipping
or you could dip it right away.
But this looks amazing.
My little peanut butter eggs are all chilled and much firmer
and now we're gonna dip them.
So this is the only part where you're gonna use
a little bit of ingenuity.
You can dip them totally in there,
but that could get a little bit messy.
So I think I'm gonna try a couple different ways.
A little offset special here
and I'm going to place it right over the chocolate
and then spoon it over.
So let's see how that goes.
And then you can just tap, tap, tap.
(tapping)
Cause you wanna get rid of some of the excess chocolate.
Now I'm using two skewers.
(laughs)
Let's try it a different way.
Impale your egg,
(beeps)
using a fork,
spoon some chocolate over that egg,
then you're going to remove some excess
from the side if you need to.
Here now we're gonna tap the egg on the bowl.
This will help us remove some excess chocolate.
Swipe across the bottom,
get all that extra chocolate off.
Now we're gonna place our egg back onto our baking sheet.
There we go, very nice.
Repeat that process and if needed,
you can warm your chocolate up a bit.
As it cools down, it'll thicken up
and make the whole dipping process more difficult,
so feel free to give it a little bit of a warmup
if it starts getting kinda gloopy.
You want it nice and thin.
While you're dipping your chocolate eggs,
you can of course sprinkle delicious
and festive things on them.
I'm using some confetti sprinkles,
just lightly sprinkle the surface while they're still wet,
but you can totally do anything else you want.
I'm gonna do a drizzle of milk chocolate on some of these
because I love the contrast
of the lighter chocolate on the darker chocolate.
Just melt a few tablespoons of milk chocolate chips,
add into a piping bag or regular sandwich bag
and snip the tip off.
You could use a smaller round tip
like a number three or four if you like,
but I don't wanna do any more washing up.
Rake across the surface and create a zigzag pattern
and it's that easy, all done.
Continue and decorate as many as you'd like.
I think that a classic,
just straight dip in chocolate looks beautiful,
if you're asking.
So I might've had one super busted (laughs) egg
because the chocolate got too cool,
but that means that I can taste it on camera for you
and not feel bad about it
not going into the boys' Easter basket.
If you like this recipe, check out my Easter playlist.
All my favorite Easter recipes,
including some ultra cute cupcakes and dazzling cakes,
but now it's time for a bite.
Mmmmmmmmmm hmm,
that's so nice.
I hadn't tempered the chocolate,
which you probably could tell,
but it still has a little bit of a crunch to it
and that peanut butter is on point, perfectly sweet.
If you like this video,
hit that like button and subscribe
and I'll see you in the next Easter video.