Jana decided to make vegan buckeye candies for a work party tomorrow. When she posted about this on Facebook, one of her Canadian friends stated that he didn’t know buckeyes are! I was aghast! I mean, I am from Ohio, and the OSU mascot is a buckeye, the team is called the Buckeyes, but before I knew any of that, I knew what a buckeye looked like, knew they were worthless for eating, and that my mom made a delicacy out of peanut butter and chocolate with the same name.
What I’ve come across since living in Toronto is that buckeye candies, or buckeyes as we know them, are totally foreign to Canadians. When we were recently in Halifax, a vegetarian restaurant had “peanut butter balls” which were peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate, and although delicious, when I explained that in Ohio, we make the same thing, but we live a small circle of the core showing and call them buckeyes, the proprietor was lost. Seems a simple concept, but if you don’t know what a buckeye seed is, then I guess it is a random term. So, a buckeye is the seed from the tree named Aesculus Glabra, in Ohio at least, and you can see what the seed looks like here:

Buckeye seeds

The goal of the candies is to make them look like that. It’s not too difficult once you get some practice with a tooth pick for dipping the balls in the chocolate. The trick to it is to make sure the peanut butter balls are nice and cold so they stay together well. My mother used to add paraffin wax to the melted chocolate to make it glossier and to keep the chocolate solid at room temperatures. The recipe we used tonight, which Jana found online somewhere doesn’t call for paraffin, but it did use vegan cream cheese in the peanut butter mixture, which is kind of interesting.

Now you know what buckeyes are and what their namesake candies are, so get to the kitchen and make some buckeyes!

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