Candy Bites Energy Balls

School was over and I had nothing new for snack, information usually met with great dismay by Crazy Kid 2. But I had a plan! With my right and dominant hand useless thanks to a tendon injury, I haven't been able to cook or bake much in the last few weeks. But energy bites are made in the food processor which I can handle single-handed. And the rolling could be done by my servants children.

We looked over our collection of pinned energy bites on Pinterest, but nothing with dates managed to catch our interest. And we had to use dates because I need to get them out of my fridge. So I asked the kids how they felt about making up our own recipe. Crazy Kid 2 and Crazy Kid 3 were enthusiastic. Crazy Kid 2 said we should put them on Pinterest if they turned out ok. :)

I asked the kids how much of the different ingredients they thought we'd need. Crazy Kid 2 has been trying to pay attention to serving size lately, so her first thought was a single serving of dates, which was about 3 whole dates. We looked at other recipes and those usually had 10 or more dates, so we started with 10. We estimated the other amounts and put the ingredients into the food processor.

The first taste of our Candy Bites Energy Balls was pretty awful. Crazy Mom accidentally put waaaayyy too much vanilla in. I thought it wasn't possible to have too much vanilla. It is. We decided to try to kill the vanilla taste with more dates. That wasn't enough. So we upped the peanut butter from 1/3 cup to 1/2 cup and that seemed to do the trick.

Crazy Kid 3 discovered you need to press pretty hard to get the mixture to stay together, but it will stick together.

I decided to make this a literacy/math mini lesson while I was at it and had Crazy Kid 2 write out the recipe, with corrections as needed. We got to talk about fractions, abbreviations, and measurement. We also made a life lesson out of it:

"You always need to test. You need to try again if your first experiment doesn't work. If it tastes bad, add more of the things you like. You have to try your best and if it comes out bad, do not be sad."

Words of wisdom from a six year old. :)

In case you can't easily read 1st grade writing, here is the finalized recipe.

Candy Bites Energy Bars

17 whole dates

1 cup oatmeal (we used rolled oats, not sure how quick oats would work)

1/2 cup peanut butter

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup chocolate chips

Put all of the ingredients except for the chocolate chips into the food processor. Mix until all combined. Add the chocolate chips and pulse until just distributed. You could stir in the chocolate chips separately, but I'm lazy and don't care if my chocolate chips are slightly chopped. The Crazy Kids got creative and added a chocolate chip to the top of each Candy Bite.