Are you ready for some football?!

Today is Superbowl Sunday, and in keeping with a tradition I began last year, I prepared cocoa crispy chocolate peanut butter rice krispy treat footballs.  This is a fabulous crowd-pleasing recipe that is perfect for this special time of year. 

3 tablespoons butter
1 10 oz. package marshmallows
1/2 cup peanut butter
6 cups cocoa krispies cereal
frosting to decorate

Melt butter over low heat, add marshmallows and stir until completely melted, then remove from heat.  Stir in peanut butter until melted.  Add cereal and stir until well coated.  Using buttered hands shape into 16 3 inch footballs.  Decorate.

I made some additions to the recipe from last year that I think have made a great aesthetic improvement to these footballs.  Because the krispies are coated in marshmallow and peanut butter, the footballs are a light chocolate brown color.  To make these treats even more delicious and a deeper brown color, more like a football, this year I dipped them in chocolate, and then decorated them with frosting.  The chocolate mixture is just a simple ganache, made by melting chocolate chips with a little bit of heavy cream until the mixture is liquid but still firm enough that it will not run down the treats.  Also, I don't know how others feel about melting things in the microwave, but I find it to be a terrible experience and today was no exception.  First I tried to melt the chocolate chips in the microwave and it was an awful, clumpy, unusable mess.  I took the same mixture to the stove to try it again with perfect results. 

Here are the comparison footballs from last year to this year.