"They should be easier than the Samoas!" I thought, because I'm an idiot.
The shortbread bases cooked up just peachy. No problems there.
Mixed up the peanut butter and sugar, heated it up to make it pipeable...all's well there too.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, a sense of impending doom was building. I wasn't quite sure why at first, but there came a point shortly after I put the cookies in the fridge for the filling to set that I realized where it was coming from.
Eventually, I was going to have to dip those things in chocolate.
Not just halfway dipping, either - no, those suckers had to be completely submerged! Panic rising, I scrambled to the computer to look at the recipe and see what the author had to say about the chocolate. Get it good and hot, she says, and keep the bowl of it over hot water to keep it thin enough to work with.
Good advice, sure, but it didn't really tell me anything about the process of getting them in the chocolate. So, like a good girl, I emailed my mother.
"Hey Mum - Say you had to dip a cookie completely in chocolate. How would you do that?"
Just a minute or two later, a reply came.
I would use the tools that you find in the candy making department of a place like Michael's.
...I should have figured this would involve tools. Hubris is a dangerous thing in the kitchen.
Beginning to panic, I look to see who's online...and there's Kevin. Kevin worked in food service! Kevin even did a brief stint in culinary school! Kevin would know, right?
Kevin: stick a toothpick in the peanut butter now while it's setting?
Kevin: And then pull them out once the chocolate sets?
Not a bad idea, I figured. So I ran to the refrigerator, pulled out the cookies, and started jabbing each of them with a couple of toothpicks each. Two, I figured, just in case one fell out. Good logic, right?
Well...all it really did was give me a tray of cookies that looked like a tiny invading army of sweet, delicious aliens. I melted the chocolate, I tried to dip one by the toothpicks, and it was like dipping a cookie in the La Brea Tar Pits. Down went the cookie, and just the tiniest tug on its toothpick antennae promptly removed them from the cookie, leaving me to fish it out with a fork.
"This chocolate's too thick!" I wailed, and I turned up the heat on the water under the chocolate.
Uncle Mike, calm as usual, says, "Why don't you put some milk in it?"
All right, that seemed reasonable. So I splashed in a little milk.
...and about ten seconds down the line found myself frantically stirring a horrible, grainy fudgy mess. (According to my brother and his giant man-crush on Alton Brown, this is because I didn't put in ENOUGH milk. Then he started talking about molecules and I stopped paying attention.)
Several curses and grumblings later, I pitched the whole mess, took all the toothpick antennae out of my alien army, and put them back in the refrigerator. A request was made for more chocolate chips to melt (because of course I used my last bag on this monstrous failure).
While Uncle Mike went to the store, I used the time to ask the internet what to do about this too-thick-chocolate problem--since obviously my uncle didn't really know the answer to this. The first suggestion I saw said to put a couple tablespoons of oil in the chips, and heaven knows I wasn't gonna fool around with a ganache, so...oil it was.
And it worked! Well...okay, sort of. The chocolate was thin enough for dipping. With a little help from my aunt, I managed to just use my fingers to dip them in the chocolate and get them back out - it made a mess, but it worked. The only problem was the the chocolate absolutely refused to set but just so much. It took the better part of 24 hours in the fridge to get anything solid out of them. And they're...um...kinda funny-looking.
The up side, though?
Totally delicious. Even better than the Samoas bars!
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