Buckeyes - my wife loves me

Spouses show their love in different ways. Some with expensive gifts. Some with lavish travel. Some with heartfelt poetry. My wife shows me she loves me by making me Buckeyes every Christmas.

Buckeyes
1 1/2 cups creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla
4 cups powdered sugar
6 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips or the chocolate of your choice
2 tbs shortening

Cover a cookie sheet with waxed paper. Mix the peanut butter, butter, vanilla and powdered sugar to form a smooth stiff dough of sorts. Shape the dough into 60-120 small balls and put them on the cookie sheet. Size them somewhere between a shooter marble and slightly smaller than a golf ball. The size is really up to you, I like them small so I can just pop them in my mouth and not feel like too much of a glutton. Melt the chocolate and shortening together over a hot water bath, stir until smooth. Take the chilled balls out of the fridge and harpoon them with a toothpick one at a time. Dip them into the melted chocolate and return to the wax paper. Return to the fridge for a half hour to set up. You probably don't have to keep them refrigerated but I like to. I think they're better that way.

You could probably technically consider these some sort of no bake cookie. Though, with no flour in sight, that might be a stretch. Really, they're a candy, sort of a home made peanut butter cup. They're delicious and I love them. My kids keep calling them buckyballs. I think it's because I recently tried to explain that carbon has a bunch of different allotropes. That is, the same element can have radically different qualities depending on how it is arranged, even though it's still the same stuff. Carbon is still carbon if it's a diamond, or graphite, or Buckminsterfullerene, (more commonly called Buckyballs) it's just arranged differently. My kids understood diamond and graphite, but I sort of lost them on Buckyballs, or C-60. I tried and tried to explain it to them, but they just couldn't picture it. From now on when I'm having trouble getting a concept across I'm going to say "It's like I'm trying to explain Buckminsterfullerene to a five year old here!" I could make buckeyes myself, but if I did that, how would my wife show me that she loves me as much as she does?