Gift of Myself

byEthan Zielazny

English/Reading 4/5

Introduction

• What I did for the Gift of Myself project was make buckeyes for my Grandma Zielazny. I chose this because my Grandma lives alone now and can’t make buckeyes by herself anymore and she likes them a lot. It is her recipe and she used to make them with my Grandpa and give them to us every Christmas. I made them at my house and they took me about 3 to 3 ½ hours.

Gather the Ingredients

• First, I had to get all of my ingredients out of the pantry. They included powdered sugar, peanut butter, and chocolate. My feelings at that time were that I hoped all would go off as planned.

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Preparing the Buckeye Dough• Here I am preparing the

peanut butter dough by putting all of the ingredients in the mixing bowl and mixing them. First I put in the butter and powdered sugar. After they mixed for a while I added the peanut butter.

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Mixing the Ingredients

• Here I am mixing all of the ingredients together one last time. I’m starting to get everything ready for making them into peanut butter balls. I’m feeling happy that I have not messed up yet.

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Making the Peanut Buttter Balls

• After all of the ingredients were mixed I rolled the peanut butter dough into buckeye shaped balls. The recipe makes over 5 dozen buckeyes and I had to do all of them. I was worried it would take forever but it didn’t.

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Melting the Chocolate

• Here I am getting the stove ready to melt the chocolate in the double boiler. The chocolate is a special candy chocolate that hardens quickly onto the buckeyes which helped decrease break time. I was hoping that I wouldn’t burn the chocolate.

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Dipping into the Chocolate

• After the chocolate was melted I put each peanut butter ball on a toothpick and dipped it in the chocolate. After every couple buckeyes I had to stir the chocolate so it didn’t harden. I was starting to feel very happy because I was accomplishing something I knew would surprise my Grandma and make her very happy.

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Taking out Toothpicks

• Once I was done dipping the peanut butter balls in the chocolate I had to remove the toothpicks from the balls. This had to be done gently so I didn’t mess up the peanut butter or break off part of the toothpick in the buckeye. I was feeling nervous because I didn’t want to mess up when I was nearing the end.

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Finished Buckeyes

• This is a picture of the finished buckeyes. Of course I sampled a buckeye and it was awesome! I was happy that I finished and proud of my work. I also had a sense of accomplishment and pride that I did it all by myself. 12

Clean-up

• After the buckeyes were complete I had to wash the dishes and dry them. The washing wasn’t so bad but the drying took longer than I thought. I felt good when I was done because even though it took a long time I still did it and I didn’t break anything!

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Packaging the Buckeyes

• This is me packaging the buckeyes to take to my Grandma Zielazny’s house. After I packaged them I was almost done with the project which I was happy about. All I had was one more step left.

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Delivering to Grandma

• This is a picture of me giving the buckeyes to my Grandma Zielazny. This made me feel great! I was so happy because instead of Grandma making them for us I was able to make them for my Grandma. It was something I had never done. It made me feel really good to surprise her.

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Conclusion

• My overall reaction from the project was really good and fulfilling. It felt nice to do something for my Grandma that she can’t do for herself anymore. She was happy and surprised that she got buckeyes and proud that I did it myself. The impact it had on my life was that I helped bring some cheer to my Grandma over the holidays. I also learned how to make buckeyes by myself which was something I had never done before. The impact it on my grandma’s life was that she was proud I had done something like that on my own and that she got to enjoy some yummy buckeyes. I think it also brought back some nice memories of years past when she made the buckeyes with my Grandpa. If the opportunity to do something for my Grandma presented itself again I would most certainly take advantage of it.