64 recipes down, 51 to go. 131 days left till end of challenge.

Okay, so technically these are crispy millet and peanut butter buckeyes, but the Thugs tell us that they are basically peanut butter cups in ball form (or in my case, in weird shaped lump form).

These little guys will really show you what you are made of. They will test your fine motor skills like no other tasty treat. My fine motor skills are, let’s just say rather shocking to an unsuspecting observer, and to those who know me well, frankly quite laughable. If you are a normal person with normal, fairly average fine motor skills and coordination I’m sure this will be breeze for you and you will make beautiful little circular balls, coated perfectly in chocolate, perhaps even leaving a gap for the peanut butter filling to peep out of. Just like in the delicious photo in the Thug Kitchen Cookbook. But for me, deformed was the best I could do.

All the ingredients are healthy except for  the powdered sugar (unless you are also using peanut butter that has added E-numbers and refined sugar galore. You know the stuff I mean. The stuff that makes your kids twitch for several hours after having it.)

First I toasted the millet, as per the instructions. Then I mixed together the other ingredients, which at first were very dry, and hard to stir, but then became a thick dough.

I threw in the toasted millet, stirred like crazy, and it was ready to be rolled into little balls. (feel free to insert any number of “little balls” jokes here).

Rolling the balls wasn’t easy. It was less of a play dough type rolling, than a squashing dough into little lumps in my hands. They kept crumbling and I wondered if I’d messed up somewhere along the line and left out some vitally sticky, binding-type ingredient. No wonder the Thugs say walnut-sized balls. In my case the walnut theme ran all the way from the size, right into the shape too. Not smooth and circular like balls, but random lumps like walnuts or cat shits.

Anyway, I popped my cat shit shaped treats into the freezer and went off to do something else. I can’t remember what it was, but I remember setting a timer on my phone so I wouldn’t forget my balls were chilling in the freezer. It seemed like something the Thugs would do, they seem to have their shit together. (I see in my mind’s eye a logo coming together-What Would Thug Kitchen Do? Print that shit on a T-shirt, and franchise the shit out of it.)

Some time later I whipped my balls out of the freezer, and melted some chocolate. The melting was easy enough….the dipping, not so much. I am not very coordinated so the whole gently lowering a ball into the chocolate with a fork, and carefully coating the sides didn’t come naturally to me. I got fed up pretty fast. So in the end I thought, fuck this, I’m not leaving some little winking eye open with the peanut butter sticking out. I dumped all the balls I had into the glass jug full of melted chocolate and twirled them around until they were all sort of coated. I was in a rush and couldn’t be dealing with taking time to make what already resembled cat shit look pretty. What’s the expression? Something about polishing a turd? Anyway, because I was rushing, a few of them crumbled open and they got stuck to one another, so I had to separate them before sticking them on the baking sheet. Probably it would have been faster if I’d just kept my cool and done what the Thugs had instructed, instead of just dumping them all in and stirring frantically.

So I popped these dark brown clumpy lumps in the freezer (I felt like I was getting to know my freezer in new, intimate ways during the course of this recipe) and left them totally unattended overnight. Looking back, I now think this may have been my mistake. We have a ‘fast-freeze’ shelf in the freezer which will freeze shit like no other freezer will. I mean it will be rock solid in a matter of hours. Perhaps this dried the buckeyes out? Who knows.

The finished result:

They don’t look at pretty as the ones on the pages of the Thug Kitchen cookbook, but let’s just say there’s a reason that there are only three in the photo, and that reason is that the other 21 got eaten rather rapidly, and those are the only three that were left.

They had that perfect flavour balance of sweetness and peanut buttery-ness. However, -and this is a BIG however- something about this particular batch of buckeyes was rather dry. They had a dry and crumbly consistency. It may have been because I was running low on peanut butter, so I used the slightly drier remnants at the bottom of the peanut butter jar…Or it might’ve been because they dried out from being in our crazy freezer. Who knows? But I think next time I’ll try oilier peanut butter, and less freezer incarceration time for these bad boys.

Reactions to them were mixed. One friend loved them. Another friend said ‘Hey these will be great for when we work out!’ (They are the most decadent work-out snack I’ve ever tried, but they’re sorta perfect because they’re full of energy and protein) and one friend tried one and refused to have any more. But I have a feeling that friend is an anti-peanutbutter-friend, so that doesn’t count. As for me, I loved them, but my dry version of them does provide the consumer with instant cotton mouth. It’s like traipsing stoned through the Sahara desert after someone’s stolen your water bottle, and replaced the spit in your mouth with an amazing peanut buttery taste.

The crunch from the millet ain’t half bad either.