You know those videos on Facebook, the ones that show a recipe being made sped up, so that the entire thing takes under a minute? I’ve watched plenty of these in my day, but had never actually taken the next step of making one, until last week! Yes, I made a recipe from one of Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos, and here is how it went.

First off, here is the video. The recipe is for No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter M&M Balls; last week I had a hankering for homemade chocolate chip cookies, but I don’t have a stand mixer, so my mom found this recipe instead. I was going to save it for Valentine’s Day (Jeff loves chocolate and peanut butter), but we are going away a couple days later so I decided to make them last week instead. Since this was my first time using one of these videos, I decided to follow their recipe exactly and see what happened. So here is the recipe presented in the video.

1) Mix together 1 1/2 cups of peanut butter, 1/2 cup of melted butter, 2 1/2 cups of powdered sugar and M&Ms.

2) Form into balls and freeze 20 min. or until firm.

3) Melt chocolate chips. Microwave 60 seconds (check and stir every 15). Coat balls in melted chocolate and chill until firm.

Now, going step by step, here are my thoughts.

1) The point of these sped up videos is to show how easy a particular recipe is. So I was a little surprised to discover, once I started this step, that 1 1/2 cups of peanut butter is just a normal-sized jar of peanut butter, and 1/2 cup of butter is a stick (this I was pretty sure of beforehand). So I wondered, especially considering who Buzzfeed’s audience is, why wouldn’t they have just said 1 jar of peanut butter and 1 stick of butter? It would have made the recipe appear even easier to make, and I would have saved the step of using measuring cups for the peanut butter and then having to wash them so I could use them for the powdered sugar. Speaking of the powdered sugar, yes, 2 1/2 cups is a lot. I had a feeling I didn’t need to use that much, though I do love sweet things, so I did. If I make these again, I’ll probably use closer to 1 cup or 1 1/2 cups of powdered sugar. I just winged it on the M&Ms. I used regular M&Ms, though next time I would probably use minis, since the balls aren’t very big, and that would give you more M&Ms per bite.

2) Onto step 2. Here are my peanut butter balls:

You can see that the ones in the top left, the first ones I made, look smoother. I’m guessing this is because the more balls I made the warmer my hands got, so towards the end the peanut butter started sticking to my hands. But this step was pretty easy, and the balls were firm after 20 min., though I did leave them in for a couple extra minutes to be safe.

3) Chocolate chips. How many?! This I would have liked to know. I decided to buy a 12 oz. bag, which is the smallest size bag in the baking aisle. I melted it in the microwave in intervals, like the video said, and that worked fine.

So smooth!

Then came the coating. If you look at the photo below, you’ll see why I wished I knew how many chocolate chips to use.

I could tell that there wasn’t going to be enough chocolate with probably 5 or 6 balls left; I really stretched it out at the end there. If I had purchased the next size bag of chips I might have had a little leftover, but there definitely would have been enough for the number of balls I made, which happened to be 20. I guess they didn’t specify an amount of chocolate chips because they didn’t specify a number of or size of balls either (mine were slightly smaller than a meatball), but something like 12 oz. of chocolate per 15 peanut butter balls would have been helpful.

So then these went in the fridge to chill, which didn’t take long; the first ones I dipped had pretty much hardened by the time I finished the last ones 15 minutes later. Then later that night came the moment of truth: the taste test.

YUM.

I mean, it’s peanut butter, chocolate, butter, powdered sugar and M&Ms. What did you expect? They were definitely super sweet and I think they would still be delicious if I took the powdered sugar down. However, they were so decadent that you could really only eat one at a time, so in that sense they worked perfect as a small indulgent sweet treat. Yes there were a few things from the recipe video that I would have changed, but the final product was exactly what I was expecting and was hoping for. And now I’m intrigued enough that I might even try another recipe from a Tasty video in the future!