These gluten-free Dark Chocolate Crispy Peanut Butter Balls are literally ALL of my favorite things in one. Dark chocolate, peanut butter, they’re a little creamy, a little crunchy and they have the perfect bit of salt on top. WHAT? Did I dream these?

We had a small outdoor, safe, Thanksgiving celebration here at out house with our little “Pandemic Pod of Pals” and I made a full spread of classic, Thanksgiving food w could enjoy outside on our deck. Our friend Audrey offered to bring her famous Chocolate Peanut Butter Balls to share and when dinner ended and I pulled them from the fridge, made sure they were gluten-free and then promptly popped one into my mouth. After I yelled a few overly excited expletives I realized for me, it was love at first bite!! I believe while I was dancing with one of these in my mouth, my exact quote was (and I will leave out my excited use of the F-word) – “OMG, what is this magic? This is all of my most favorite things in one bite!!!”

After getting Audrey’s original recipe, I made a few small tweaks to the recipe, swapping powdered sugar for coconut sugar and maple syrup, leaving out vegan butter and cutting it in half and opting for salted grass-fed butter instead (you can also use ghee or coconut oil here, too) and the box of sprouted brown rice cacao crisps I already had in the pantry made for the perfect crispy crunchy interior.

There’s just something about the classic flavors of dark chocolate and peanut butter that I will never tired of and while there are so many nut butter alternatives and yeh, sure, they are good, they just don’t quite do it for me the way that peanut butter does (see below for options and alternatives for other options, if you must).

Making these Dark Chocolate Crispy Peanut Butter Balls was a therapeutic baking session (sans actually baking) thanks to the sadness of my cancelled plans. There’s something about being in the kitchen, Christmas music blaring and making something sweet that is instantly soothing to the soul.

The best part about these, since they make well over 4 dozen balls, they are perfect to portion out and share with people you love, especially for the holidays. Leave a small box for your neighbors, give some to your trainer in an effort to bribe him to go easy on you in your workout (I might have done that) or just keep them ALL for yourself.

I have since learned, thanks to Google that these Rice Crispy Peanut Butter Balls are a classic recipe, though many of the original recipes include half as much cereal and peanut butter and a full cup of powdered sugar, plus milk chocolate. I can’t even imagine how overly sweet those are. I really love that these Dark Chocolate Crispy Peanut Butter Balls are the perfect amount of sweet without hitting you over the head with it.

I hope you enjoy these Dark Chocolate Crispy Peanut Butter Balls as such as I did – and please let me know if they make you scream swear words out of pure glee, too!

By the way, in other circumstances I would have loved to share process photos while I made these, but to be fair, I did make them at like 8pm on a Sunday night after we found out our Yosemite trip had been officially cancelled because our campgrounds had closed due to this secondary lock down in California. So it is what it is, like the rest of 2020!

Also, hey – did you hear the news?

Speaking of chocolate, in case you missed it, I officially unveiled the brand new Tasty Yummies web store last week and introduced the three exclusive Tasty Yummies raw organic dark chocolate bars – Basic B, Salty B and Spicy B. All of the bars are dairy-free, cane sugar-free featuring the right amount of sweetness from mineral-rich coconut sugar, and luscious raw cacao butter stone ground at low temperatures. I am so proud of these bars and I am so excited to finally share them with all of you.

While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend melting down these Tasty Yummies Chocolate Bars like 10 of them for this particular recipe, they are the perfect bar to savor and enjoy every single day.

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