One year when I was little, Chris and Chuck compiled all of our most-used recipes into one cookbook, intelligently named "The Cady Cookbook." We were imaginative writers at a young age, clearly.
Below is one of the favorite desserts toddler Cathy made. It is a three-ingredient marvel. All you need is Peanut Butter, Honey, and Powdered Milk. You read that right. Powdered milk. Powdered milk was a staple in our home, and when you mix it in with Peanut Butter and Honey, you can barely taste it. In fact, it creates a pleasant crunchiness that you can pretend is something delicious, like Rice Krispies, rather than the precursor of Anthrax.
It's pretty self-explanatory. Mix the wet ingredients, add the dry. Roll into balls. Wha-bam! There are a few things that are VERY important, though, to make it a true Cady cooking experience.
1) There are those that advise that the kitchen should be clean before you start a recipe. If you're a Cady, just shove stuff out of the way on the counter and gather your ingredients. Ignore the mess in the room behind you, too. In fact, when looking at the background of this picture, I'm pretty proud the towels are folded.
2) You must take the ingredients out of the largest container possible. I'm rather ashamed of my milk box. We used to get our powdered milk by the 25-pound bag then separate it into a bunch of large tupperware containers, just like all our other staples (sugar, white flour, brown sugar, etc. Wheat flour is a whole other story). The honey is pretty respectably sized - it's tough to go wrong from Costco. The only problem is that it is still completely liquified. It is lacking the crusty top layer - and by top layer, I mean 3/4 of my childhood honey was a crystalized chunk.
3) While pretty, it is wholly unnecessary/unrealistic to have matching utensils. If you haven't got 8 different styles of measuring cups, then you probably don't have 10 kids who pilfer the cups for their own uses (playing in the outdoor
4) Clean up on your way? Yeah right! Let's be happy I'm even in the kitchen making something. And it's unfair to expect the cooker to be the cleaner, too. Cleaning the kitchen builds kids' character, and the hatred of cleaning the kitchen fosters the desire to be the one
Here are the ingredients.
- 1/2 cup Peanut Butter
- 1/2 cup Honey
- 1 cup Powdered Milk
Check out the mis-matched cups. Oh yeah. Even better, the measuring cup full of honey is melted. Truth be told, that measuring cup is one of my favorites. It has stories to tell. It has a history. It has obviously lived through some pretty traumatic cooking experiences. I connect with it in on a basic level.
Don't worry about being crazy careful with the ingredients. If the peanut butter (or any other ingredient) cup runneth over, that's cool.
Put the peanut butter into a medium-sized bowl, then pour the honey over the top. It is very important that you don't put the honey in first. Here's why: when you pour the honey over the peanut butter, it is a strangely satisfying experience. I like to imagine I am the Goddess of Honey pouring golden lava onto a barren brown mountain. The plop of the peanut butter into honey doesn't provide as much fodder for the imagination.
When you have finished your mythological disaster, just mix the two ingredients up. Feel free to sample - it's sooo good!
After it's mixed, add the powdered milk and start stirring. This is going to be more difficult, and you're going to get frustrated that the milk isn't combining well with the other two ingredients. At this point my may think you're doing something wrong and know that you will never eat these horrific things. Your mixture will look something like the picture above.
Stop your worrying! Take a small amount, maybe a bouncy-ball size, into your hand. The peanut butter ball in my hand doesn't give a great representation. My children's hands have been bigger than mine since they were about 8. Cursed tiny hands that can barely reach an octave on the piano, and more often than not are hitting the 2nd or the 7th key, too. Oops! I'll stop lamenting about my hands and get back to the task at hand (appropriate saying, eh?)
Take the dough and roll it into a ball in your hand. That action will mix the milk into the ball so you can't hardly even tell it's there. The powdered milk really likes this, because then it sneak attacks when you take a bite.
Roll 'em all up and voila! Peanut butter balls! You don't need to cook them, and you can even pretend they're quasi healthy!
The recipe says that you can roll the balls in toppings, but it's totally not necessary. If you're anything like the Crazy Cady's, this is the point where they start getting popped into your mouth (or the mouths of your thieving siblings), and they'll never make it to the topping stage. I added sprinkles because my husband hates anything that connotes joy, so I thought this would stop him from foraging too many.
Tony the Tiger was the first taste tester. In the background, you can see that Roscoe (yes, that's a cone of shame) wants to be the next!
After I made these, I went upstairs to take a shower (not an indication how messy I was!). When I came down, they were all gone! I think dear sweet Cady (it was always a dream to have a daughter with my maiden name!) had more than her fair share.
This recipe is SUPER easy, and I was making it from the time I was a little child. If you want a starter recipe for your kids, this is the one for you! Below is the recipe, straight from The Cady Cookbook.
Cathy
I am so impressed. Our family makes these with powdered sugar instead of the milk, thus removing any semblance of healthy ingredients and tripling the calorie count. Man they are good. No sprinkles needed.
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