Sunday, March 8, 2009

Grandma Ryno's Peanut Clusters

Have y'all noticed that I have posted more in the first 2 months of 2009 than I did in all of 2008? I think this occurred because of 2 reasons: 1. I enjoy this hobby, and I put a lot of my free time into cooking/baking and photographing, and 2. I found out how to automatically post a few weeks ago, which means I write up a whole bunch of things on Sunday (my day off), and they can be automatically posted during the week. How cool is that!?!

On to the recipe...



Grandma Ryno sent us delicious peanut cluster candy during Christmas time, and let's face it---Tony didn't eat more than one bite. I took care of the rest, to say the least. When I asked her for the recipe, I was expecting to have to use a candy thermometer, and slave diligently over the stove, paying for my sin of gluttony.

I was surprised to find that this recipe is one of the easiest I've encountered, all thanks to the crockpot! This is a "dump-and-go" recipe, which can sit in the crockpot for a few hours while you clean up the house (= take a 2 hour nap to sleep off a migraine).

I hope you all enjoy this recipe, which could easily be modified with different nuts and perhaps also different kinds of chocolate to suite a variety of tastes!


Ingredients:

1 160z jar of dry roasted peanuts
1/2 12oz bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 oz (half a brick) of Baker's German sweet chocolate
1 1b white almond bark

*Note, I'm not exactly sure how big my crockpot is, but it is a standard size Rival (I think 3 quarts). I'm far too lazy to test it out and measure how many quarts it can hold. Just make sure you have a large enough one (i.e. not a Little Dipper), and not one that is too large to make the layers described below.*

Procedure:



1. Layer the nuts, chocolate chips, German chocolate and almond bark (all bars broken into squares) in the crockpot. DO NOT MIX! Set the crockpot on "low", and cover.

2. Don't touch anything (seriously---you have to resist!) for 3 hours. Turn off the crockpot, and allow the mixture to sit, covered for 20 minutes.

3. Stir the mixture thoroughly, and carefully drop spoonfuls on waxed paper to cool for at least 30 minutes. Tony found out the hard way (and didn't care) that they're still a little gooey before the half hour is up :).

4. This made roughly 3.5 dozen clusters, though the number will vary with the size of cluster you make. Be sure to share, and feel free to make people think you slaved over these babies--they are that good!



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