Peanut Butter Eyeballs {easy Halloween treat}

In today’s post: These peanut butter eyeballs are an easy Halloween treat!

The Halloween candy is officially out in full force at the grocery stores! Every year I wait as long as possible to buy candy for the trick or treaters, because if I buy it too early I’ll just eat it all and have to buy more. Plus, now that it’s fall it’s officially baking and candy making season! When the weather drops below a certain threshold it just feels right to spend a little time in the kitchen making something delicious. This week we’ve been making Peanut Butter Eyeballs:

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been making peanut butter balls as a special Christmas treat. My whole family loves them! We love them enough, in fact, that I’ve decided to start making a version for every holiday. We make peanut butter hearts for Valentine’s Day and peanut butter eggs for Easter and now we have eyeballs for Halloween.

Find 20 more easy Halloween treats right here

Peanut Butter Eyeballs recipe

Peanut butter balls (also known as buckeye balls) are super easy to make. Here’s a printable recipe card for you, and then I’ve included my tips below.

Tips for making Peanut Butter Eyeballs

This recipe makes 25 eyeballs, but you can easily double or triple it if you’d like. I used a tablespoon to scoop out the peanut butter dough for each eyeball, and underfilled it just slightly. You can do that if you want to make sure each ball is exactly the same size; however, you can also just eyeball it and you’ll be fine 😉

You’ll roll each scoop of dough between your hands to make a nice ball, and then chill them in the fridge for a few minutes to make them easier to handle when dipping.

When it comes to the chocolate you dip the balls in, you can use whatever type of chocolate you would like. Almond bark or candy coating is one option; it will give a shiny, hard coating, but it doesn’t taste as good as real chocolate. However, real chocolate or chocolate chips may not result in as smooth and shiny of a finish, because once you melt chocolate you have to “temper” it to get it to set up shiny and hard again. You can try melting your chocolate very slowly using a double boiler so it never gets hot enough to lose it’s temper (ha!) but that can be a fiddly process.

So what I’ve switched to doing is to use half milk chocolate flavored almond bark and half semi sweet chocolate chips. This combination sets up nicely and tastes better than almond bark alone. That’s what I did for this post. (Ok, I actually used milk chocolate chips in these photos, but I prefer the stronger flavor of semi sweet chips.)

Make sure to melt it in the microwave in 30 second intervals, stirring thoroughly after each time in the microwave. It will only take two or maybe three times in the microwave to get nice and melty.

Pull the peanut butter balls out of the fridge, and pour your melted chocolate into something that’s taller than it is wide, like a small jar or cup. Stab each peanut butter ball with a toothpick and dunk it in the chocolate to coat, leaving a circle on the top of the ball uncovered.

Place the coated peanut butter ball back on the cookie sheet, using another toothpick if needed to set it down. I like to let the coated balls set up for a few minutes before adding the eye candies. I just used a dot of melted chocolate on the back of each eye candy to “glue” it to the peanut butter ball.

You can let these set up at room temperature or in the fridge. Enjoy!