Messy Mice

It's been said by many people in many places that it takes more than the ability to read a recipe and follow its directions to be a good cook. I'd revise that statement by changing good to competent. Having the...pleasure of observing the husband following a recipe relatively solo, I believe my proffered change to that good cook adage is affirm. Enjoy the post, Gentle Reader. I have powdered sugar to clean up....

--The Faudie
We had a (rare) rainy Saturday in Austin this weekend, affording us a perfect opportunity to stay at home and tackle a recipe from this year's Taste of Home Halloween Food & Fun. Angela said she was leaving this project to me and the boy, but the kiddo abandoned me pretty early in the process, leaving me alone in the kitchen.

Left to my own devices, would I end up with a horror story to go along with the Halloween theme? Read on for the frightening details.

From the many sugary treats the boy and I are keen on trying from the Taste of Home magazine, we'd chosen the following deceptively simple recipe to try.

Midnight Mice1 C creamy peanut butter
1/4 C butter, softened
1/2 t vanilla extract
1 1/2 C confectioners' sugar
1 1/2 C crisp rice cereal
3/4 C sliced almonds
12 oz. dark chocolate candy coating, chopped
1 T shortening
36 2" pieces black shoestring licorice
Assorted small candies, such as red cake decorator dots, M&Ms semisweet miniature baking bits, black sugar

1. In a small bowl, beat the peanut butter, butter and vanilla until blended.
2. Gradually beat in the confectioners' sugar.
3. Stir in the cereal.
4. Shape the mixture into 1" balls, tapering one end to resemble a mouse's snout.
5. Position almonds on the mouse head for ears.
6. Refrigerate the mice until chilled.
7. In a large, microwave-safe bowl, melt the candy coating and shortening, then stir until smooth.
8. Dip the mice into the coating, the place on a wax paper-lined baking sheet.
9. Immediately insert a licorice piece into each mouse for its tail.
10. Place candy on the head for the mouse's eyes and nose.
11. Sprinkle each mouse with black sugar (optional).
12. Refrigerate until set.

Yield: 3 dozen mice

Before I get any further into this story, allow me to introduce one key fact: The only creamy peanut butter we had in the house was a jar of Better 'n Peanut Butter. Better 'n Peanut Butter is a great, low-fat, low-calorie spread. It's also really, really gooey. Too gooey for this particular recipe, I would soon find out.

Oblivious to the disaster I had in the making, I began working on my mice. I blended together [I had to clue him in that the direction to "beat together" in the recipe meant that he should use the electric mixer and a pair of beaters --The Faudie] the Better 'n Peanut Butter with the butter [which I pointed out he should have creamed in the bowl as the first step --The Faudie] and the confectioners' sugar, trying hard to keep a clean workspace.

Maybe I should have tried a little harder.

After adding in the cereal, it was time to shape some mice. It quickly became apparent, though, that my mixture didn't have the consistency it needed. It was just too soft. Even after refrigeration, the mice were too gooey to proceed any further with.

The three of us ate the failed experiment for dessert that night. We didn't even bother to enrobe them, as we didn't want to waste the white almond bark candy coating we were going to use to give them the appearance of lab rats. The not-quite-mice were pretty tasty, though, so I planned on trying the recipe again the next day.

They look like melted mice!

On Sunday we picked up some real peanut butter along with some chocolate CandiQuik (by this point, I didn't care if they were lab rats or not--I just wanted some mice!), and I started over. I ran out of the plain rice cereal the second time around, so I supplemented it with some Choconilla Cocoa Krispies, a cereal we've had around the house so long that I don't think it's listed on Kellogg's Web site any more. This time, the mixture was nice and thick, so much so that I actually had a difficult time getting all of the cereal folded in. [That he chose a bowl two times too small had nothing to do with that difficulty whatsoever. --The Faudie] But it worked perfectly as material for forming the mice, as if it were some kind of pleasant, peanut-scented Play-Doh.

Apparently the only thing better than Better 'n Peanut Butter...is peanut butter.

Much better-looking than the previous batch of mice

The mixture was shaped into mouse-looking lumps and were properly chilled and ready for enrobing in chocolate--and here's where I ran into more problems.

My brilliant plan was to poke the mice in their rears with a bamboo skewer, then dip them into the chocolate. (The resulting holes in their rears could then be used to hold the ends of their tails--clever, don't you think?) Unfortunately, the butt of the first mouse I tried this with crumbled, and we had to come up with a different approach.

In the end, Angela came to my rescue [again --The Faudie] and hand-painted all the little mice. As she finished each one, I added the candy details--leftover hard candy from one gingerbread kit or another for eyes and noses, and Haribo Sour S'ghetti for tails. (I'll admit that more than a few tails were devoured by me or the boy without them ever being attached to a rodent's posterior.) We'd originally intended to use candy corn--rather than the almonds called for in the recipe--for ears, but the mice ended up being so delicate I didn't want to risk sticking the candy corn into them. So we opted for making earless mice instead.

Call the health inspector--it's an infestation!

In the end, I think all the work that went into making these was worth it, though we only ended up with twenty (and that's including the one that crumbled when I tried to skewer it), not the three dozen the recipe said we'd get. I'm sure that if I'd made them smaller I could have had more, but I'm happy with the final result.

Three blind mice...blind because they have candy for eyes, natch