Driving to school on Tuesday:
Me: Hey cupcake, do you want to make pumpkin truffles tonight?
Cupcake: YEAH!!!!! YEAH, YEAH, YEAH! (FYI: She has no idea what a truffle is)
Thinking silence.
Cupcake: Mom? How do we make pumpkin tuffs?
Me: Well, we take Oreo cookies –
Cupcake: I LOVE COOKIES! YUM!
Me: — and crumble them up little bitty,
Cupcake: Why?
Me: To make it easier to roll them into balls. Then we’ll add in cream cheese –
Cupcake: CHEESE?! (utter disbelief) YUCCCCK.
Me: Not just cheese silly, CREAM cheese, that’s yummy.
Cupcake: I don’t LIKE cream cheese.
Me: You’ll like this. Trust me. Then we roll them in balls, put pretzels sticks in as the stem and dip them in orange chocolate and put green leaves on them.
Cupcake: WHAT?! Mom! Pumpkins DON’T HAVE LEAVES.
Me: Yes they do.
Cupcake: NO – THEY. DON’T. And the stems are GREEN.
Me: Are you sure about that?
Cupcake: YES. Pumpkins are orange with green stems.
Me: Well, okay. We don’t have to use pretzels I guess. What should we make the green stems with?
Cupcake: CAN-DY!
Me: That’s a very good idea. I’ll have to think about what kind of candy we can use. Do you have any suggestions?
Cupcake: GREEN candy.
Me: Righto…
Cupcake: Pumpkins do NOT have leaves. Pumpkins stems are green, Mom. They do not have leaves…
And so on until we pulled into school.
So there you have it.
Princess Cupcake’s super easy pumpkin truffles:
- 1 bag of oreo cookies. We used the reduced fat version, and yes, the whole bag
- 1 8oz container of cream cheese. We used the seasonal version of pumpkin cream cheese from Philadelphia
- A couple handfuls of small pretzel sticks – aesthetically, I’d recommend breaking these in half or thirds. But if you’re working with a little bitty helper, the longer stems are much better for dipping so their fingers don’t get in the melted chocolate. You can break them later. Or not.
- 1 bag of orange candy melts
- Crisco – gasp!
This recipe is so easy and perfect for small helpers. The Cupcake did every step, with only a little help rolling.
- 1. Chop/Grind the oreos in a food processor until fine crumbs. You could do this by hand, but then you risk lumps in your pumpkins.
- 2. Blend in 2/3 – ¾ of the cream cheese.
- 3. Roll by hand into small balls and put on a cookie sheet.
- 4. Stick pretzel sticks in the top of each ball.
- 5. Chill for 45 minutes.
- 6. Melt the orange candy melts with a heaping tablespoon of Crisco. This will make your chocolate smoother. You don’t have to add it, but your pumpkins may be a little thick. Some people use vegetable oil – I prefer Crisco. Yum.
- 7. Remove your truffles from the refrigerator 5 at a time. This keeps the others chilled until you’re ready to use them. If they warm up too much – or your 3 year old decides to reroll (and thereby warm up) one, you’ll lose some of the cookie deliciousness in the chocolate and then you have a speckled mess.
- 8. While holding the pretzel stem, dip into the chocolate, covering allthe ball up to the stem.
- 9. Place on waxed paper to set.
Then, when the Princess Cupcake goes to bed… pick out a few pumpkins and take your Betty Crocker green decorator icing with leaf tip to them and add a few leaves. While you’re at it, add a few squigglies too. But only a few.
The next morning:
Me: Hey Cupcake, I added a few leaves to your pumpkins that we made last night. Do you want to see?
Cupcake: PUMPKINS DO NOT HAVE LEAVES. I don’t like that! TAKE THOSE LEAVES OFF!
10. Eat all pumpkins with leaves immediately.
Cute! You are so nice, doing these things with your daughter. I’m not nice enough to let my kids join in most of the time. I need to work on that.
Okay, well I happen to know how MANY kids you have and I might want to escape to make — and eat — truffles all by myself sometimes too, LOL!