Acorn Annoyance

After surviving the first couple months of motherhood, I was fortunate enough to join a mom’s Bible Study affiliated with my church. It was a wonderful group of moms but since our church is about 30 minutes away (longer with traffic) from our apartment most of the small groups, including this one, is about the same distance. Since I know how isolating being a new (and for the time being stay-at-home) mom can be, I really wanted to find some moms with whom I could connect, that also live in the same area as I do. It took a few months but I am now settling into some formal (organized on meetup.com) and informal moms groups that are also nearby.

With the formal groups, each mom is required to host a play date every once in awhile.  A couple weeks ago I volunteered to host. I was excited to do so because I had been wanting a reason to make these  chocolate-peanut butter acorns that I had seen in a Martha Stewart Living magazine.  After reading the directions, I thought that it would be really easy to make and that once I made them they would look just like the picture. How wrong I was! It took so long for me to roll out the peanut butter and they definitely did not have that perfect acorn shape. When it was time for me to dip the “acorn” into the chocolate, the shape became even more messed up. The reason was because the chocolate had to be hot enough in order to stay melted but then the heat from the chocolate would then melt the peanut butter causing the shape to change. Below is a picture of some of the more decent looking ones that I made.

Overall I was really disappointed with how they ended up looking. I still ended up serving the “acorns” at the play date and all the moms were of course very gracious.  They thought they were cute and the “acorns” also (at least) tasted delicious. It is hard to go wrong with a combination of peanut butter, chocolate, sugar and butter. I ended up eating more than just a few at a couple sittings. For the play date I had also prepared ham and cheese crêpes (which also took awhile to make), homemade hummus (a little complicated since I also made one of the ingredients tahini which is a sesame seed spread from scratch) and some other store bought snacks.

Lessons learned from this experience:

1. No matter how easy a recipe looks, that may not be the case, especially one from Martha Stewart. I should have known since in the past I had made a craft that looked easy but ended up taking a long time and being harder than I thought.
2. Be mentally prepared for the possibility that it might not end up looking the way I had originally thought it would based on the picture.
3. Find hosting recipes (tested in advance) that don’t take too long to make and aren’t too complicated.