Pumpkin cream cheese bites

What is that. Seriously. Doesn't that look gross? I guess I'm just lucky that today is Halloween and I can pretend that they were supposed to look that way.

I don't know what's wrong with me, but I cannot get the cake ball thing down. My melted chocolate is always a disaster.I do the double broiling thing. I use the Wilton melting chips. I heat it slowly and keep stirring. And it's always thick and lumpy. Steph Hall was over last night and she can testify that it was just doing weird things.

Actually, these pumpkin bites were supposed to be for my Beehives for Halloween. But making them Saturday night, the chocolate got all messed up and burned and stuff and I bagged it. They ended up getting store-bought ginger snaps - oh well. So I found some green melting chips I still had left and figured I could pass them off at work as a Halloween treat.

While they look terrible, they are incredibly delicious. I found the recipe from LillyElla and it's very easy. I doubled it and used a cookie scoop and only got about 20 balls. She must have used a pretty small scoop to get 30 out of half the recipe.

What you need:
1/2 cup canned pumpkin
1 teaspoon orange zest
4 ounces cream cheese
1 cup white chocolate chips
2/3 cup gingersnap cookie crumbs
1/2 cup graham cracker crumbs
2 tablespoon powdered sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
pinch of salt

I ground up the graham crackers and gingersnaps in a food processor - this made the crumbs really fine. It took almost an entire sleeve of graham crackers.

In the bowl of a kitchen aid mixer with the paddle attachment, I combined the pumpkin, cream cheese and orange zest.

Melt the chocolate in a microwave safe bowl, heating in 30 second increments and stirring well in between. Add to the pumpkin mixture and beat until combined.

In a separate bowl, stir together cookie crumbs, powdered sugar, cinnamon and salt. Add all at once to the pumpkin mixture and beat until smooth.

I refrigerated the batter for a little bit because it was pretty runny. Maybe 30 minutes. Then I scooped out balls onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and put the whole thing in the freezer. Since my chocolate disaster happened, i ended up freezing over night which was nice when I finally did get around to coating them in chocolate.

Dip them in melted chocolate (I give no instructions on how to do this, since I obviously can't do it) and then freeze/refrigerate until solid.

Eat slowly. Like, one at a time so your stomach doesn't hurt.