No-Bake Peanut Butter Cheesecake Balls Recipe
No-bake peanut butter cheesecake balls: cream cheese, peanut butter, powdered sugar and graham crumbs, rolled, frozen and dipped in chocolate.
- Total
- 1 hr 45 min
- Serves
- 24
- Calories (est.)
- 150
No-bake peanut butter cheesecake balls are cream cheese, peanut butter and powdered sugar, stiffened with graham cracker crumbs, rolled into balls and dipped in chocolate. Beat eight ounces of cream cheese with half a cup of peanut butter, add the sugar, vanilla and a cup of crumbs, chill, roll, freeze for half an hour and dip. The recipe makes twenty-four, and they are kept cold.
What holds no-bake peanut butter cheesecake balls together
A baked cheesecake sets with eggs in the oven. Here nothing is cooked, so the mixture is held by cold and by the crumbs: the graham crackers take up moisture from the cream cheese and turn a soft cream into something that can be rolled. The half hour in the freezer is what makes the balls firm enough to dip.
Recipe
No-Bake Peanut Butter Cheesecake Balls
Cream cheese, peanut butter, powdered sugar and graham cracker crumbs rolled into balls and dipped in chocolate, without baking. Twenty-four balls.
- Prep
- 30 min
- Cook
- 2 min
- Total
- 1 hr 45 min
- Serves
- 24
- Cuisine
- American
Ingredients
- For the filling:
- 8 ounces cream cheese, softened
- 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
- 3/4 cup powdered sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup graham cracker crumbs
- For the coating:
- 8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
- 1 tablespoon refined coconut oil
Instructions
- Beat the cream cheese and the peanut butter until smooth. Beat in the powdered sugar and the vanilla, then stir in the graham cracker crumbs.
- Cover the bowl and refrigerate for 30 minutes, until the mixture is firm enough to scoop.
- Scoop level tablespoons of the mixture, roll them into 24 balls and set them on a parchment-lined tray. Freeze for 30 minutes.
- Melt the chocolate with the coconut oil in the microwave in 20-second bursts, stirring each time, until smooth. Let it cool for 5 minutes.
- Drop one ball at a time into the chocolate, turn it with a fork, lift it out, tap off the excess and set it back on the parchment.
- Refrigerate for 15 minutes, until the chocolate has set. Keep the balls in the refrigerator.
Nutrition
- Calories:
- 150
Calculated from the ingredient quantities above using the USDA FoodData Central database, then divided by the number of servings. It is an estimate and will vary with the exact products you use.
The three-ingredient version
Without the crumbs and the vanilla, the filling is cream cheese, peanut butter and powdered sugar: 8 ounces, 1/2 cup and 1 cup. It is softer. Freeze the bowl for 45 minutes before scooping, roll the balls quickly with cold hands and freeze them again for an hour before they go into the chocolate.
Another sweet with a short list and no oven is the lemon oatmeal no-bake cookie.
Dipping without a mess
- Frozen balls, cooled chocolate. A cold ball sets the coating in seconds. A soft ball in warm chocolate loses its shape.
- A fork, not a spoon. The excess runs off between the tines.
- Coconut oil thins the chocolate so that the coat is thin and even. Refined oil has no coconut taste.
- A deep, narrow bowl keeps the chocolate deep enough to the end.
For a plainer finish, skip the chocolate and roll the balls in 1/2 cup of graham cracker crumbs.
Cold, and for how long
The filling is uncooked cream cheese, so the balls belong in the refrigerator. The USDA's rule for perishable food applies: never leave food out of refrigeration over 2 hours, and not over 1 hour above 90°F.
In a closed container they keep 5 days in the refrigerator and 2 months in the freezer. From frozen, they are ready to eat after 20 minutes in the refrigerator.
Crunchy peanut butter, white chocolate, pretzels
- Crunchy peanut butter in place of creamy adds pieces of peanut and changes nothing else.
- Natural peanut butter, the kind that separates, makes the filling oilier; stir it well and add 2 more tablespoons of crumbs.
- White or milk chocolate in place of semisweet, in the same amount.
- Crushed pretzels in place of half the graham crumbs.
More cheesecake on this site: the Costco tiramisu cheesecake, baked, and the strawberry crunch cheesecake.
Did you make this?
Let others know how it turned out.
