Sweet like chocolate

Hello Blogosphere!
I'm back from my blogging hiatus, at least for now...

I'm not going to do the traditional "this is what I've been up to" thing, thought we'd just pretend I was never away.

I'm house sitting at the moment (for one of the families I work for) and as usual when I have to be alone in a big house I'm freaked out most of the time. The nights are the worst, I check and double (triple, quadruple) check all the doors etc before I set the alarm and go upstairs to bed, yet I still lay awake for ages thinking I can hear someone downstairs. And then of course I have to go and check, which freaks me out even more. You see, I can't just go downstairs and check, I have to check all the rooms on the way down as well. Otherwise I'll get it into my head that whoever was sneaking around downstairs is hiding in one of them! Then I have to turn the alarm off and check the ground floor (every nook and cranny) before going through the whole process of checking the doors, setting the alarm etc and then going back up to bed. It's exhausting. I did not get much sleep last night!

The one good thing about house sitting though, is that I have a whole big kitchen to myself! Yay!!!
So yesterday I baked. Well I say baked but it was more just mixing a bunch of stuff together and faffing about with melted chocolate for a while, but I don't know what the proper term for that is so I'm just going to go with baked.

I found a recipe for something called cookie balls completely by chance on a blog I stumbled across whilst blog-hopping. Hmm, sounds interesting, I thought. But, of course, being me I can't just follow a recipe without adding or changing something. So here's my version:

(I didn't really measure anything whilst making these, as there's no baking and nothing needs to rise etc I don't think it's that important as long as it tastes good. You can use as much or as little of anything to get it tasting just how you like it)

Ingredients:
1 packet of oreos
Cream cheese
Peanut butter (I used crunchy)
(icing sugar to taste)
dark chocolate

Method:

1.Blitz the cookies in a food processor until they're fine crumbs.
2.In a bowl, mix the cookie crumbs with cream cheese to a sort of paste. I didn't use the whole tub.
3. Add peanut butter to taste (I was a bit careful and used about 2 teaspoons but I think it could have done with a bit more).
4. (optional) When you've mixed in the peanut butter you might find that it's not sweet. As I like my sweets sweet, I just sprinkled on a bit of icing sugar and mixed that in. Just a tiny little bit though, you don't want it too sweet!
5. Stick the mixture in the freezer for a while to make it easier to work with.
6. Working quickly shape the cold cookie-cheese mixture into little balls. Put them back in the freezer for a little while.
7. Melt the chocolate.
8. Take the balls from the freezer and dip them in the chocolate.
9. Stick them in the fridge to set.
10. Eat and enjoy!

These are quite rich but absolutely delicious especially with a nice cup of earl grey tea!
I did find that mine are best when they're kept in the fridge and eaten cold, as they go quite squidgy when they're room temperature. The original recipe said that you might want to dip them in the chocolate twice and that might help. I didn't have enough chocolate for that though and I quite like them as they are now!

So yeah, even though there's no actual baking involved it is a little bit faffy and can take a while but it's worth it as they're so scrummy!
I'm sure there are lots of different variation on this and I'm definitely going to experiment a bit more with these. Why don't you try and add your favourite things and see how they turn out!

Sab x