I am at the kitchen island rolling date balls in raw cacao at nine on a Sunday night, and Cleo, with the seriousness of a small attorney, asked me whether anyone in the neighborhood is actually going to eat them.
Marlene already warned me. She came over earlier with a Costco bag of fun-size Twix on her hip and said, “Brooke. Honey. Don’t be the date-ball house.” She said it the way you’d tell someone not to stand in front of a moving train.
Reader, I am going to be the date-ball house.
Here is what is in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkin: fourteen ingredients, three of them seed oils, two of them dyes that are banned in countries with vowels in their names, and TBHQ, which my sister-in-law Lainey, who runs the front desk at a pediatric urgent care and is basically a nurse, says she will not even type into a search bar after six p.m. She called it “the one that follows you home.”
My version: seven Medjool dates from the co-op, almond flour, raw cacao, one drop of food-grade peppermint, and a pinch of pink Himalayan salt. Salt is a mineral, not an ingredient. Each ball gets wrapped in a small square of beeswax cloth tied with hemp twine I dyed in turmeric water last August. They look, I will admit, like very small upholstered ottomans.
Wyatt asked if he could trade his date ball for one Reese’s and I told him he could trade it for one square of dark chocolate, 88% or higher, and he sighed in the exact pitch his father sighs in. Brad, for the record, has remained “publicly neutral” on the date balls, which is how Brad participates in our marriage during the month of October.
The Facebook group Whole Mothers Whole Halloween — 41,000 members, very active — has been tracking ingredient panels on this year’s fun-size bars and one woman in Findlay, Ohio found something listed only as “natural and artificial flavoring (contains milk, may contain other things).” May contain other things. That is the actual phrasing on the back of a candy we are handing to children dressed as fairies.
Lainey said the date balls are “basically medicine,” and I am not going to argue with someone who has been within fifteen feet of a vaccine fridge. She also said dates have natural fiber, which is “essentially the body’s broom,” and I have written that on a small index card I am taping to the bowl on our porch so parents can read it while their kids assess the situation.
I am aware that some of the date balls are going to end up in our boxwoods. I have made peace with this. The boxwoods are the compost. Beeswax cloth is fully biodegradable and turmeric-dyed hemp twine breaks down in roughly ninety days. Compare that to a plastic Smarties wrapper, which is going to outlive my granddaughter’s granddaughter and probably become the object a future archaeologist holds up on a podcast.
Cleo, who has been quietly watching me for forty minutes, asked if she could put one tiny sticker on each ball, a little ghost. I said yes, because the sticker is paper and the adhesive is plant-based, and because a ghost on a date ball is, I think, the closest I am going to get to making this look fun for a six-year-old in a butterfly cape.
Marlene just texted me a photo of her candy bowl. It is the size of a kitchen sink. She wrote “last chance.” I sent her back a picture of one of my date balls, ghost sticker centered, twine just so. She replied with a single thumbs-down emoji, which I am choosing to read as encouragement.