These chocolate peanut butter protein bites are made with just THREE ingredients! And probably take 3 minutes to make too. Chocolate + peanut butter is seriously one of my favorite combinations, and I love how these bites contain ZERO sugar. All you need to make these are peanut butter, chocolate protein powder, and a touch of cocoa powder!

This recipe was a happy result of me craving some buckeyes one day. I realized I hadn’t made my  healthy buckeyes in WAY too long. And then I had the idea to make the filling a CHOCOLATE peanut butter instead of just peanut butter. I omitted the chocolate coating on this batch, honestly, I think because I was just so excited to eat them haha. BUT. Coating these in melted chocolate like my original buckeyes is also a delicious option, especially if you’re looking for something more like dessert!

Ingredients for three-ingredient chocolate buckeyes:

Peanut butter

I prefer using a natural peanut butter that contains just peanuts and salt. Personally, I find natural peanut butter to have such a stronger/fresher peanut butter taste than shelf-stable peanut butters such as Jif. Although to each his own-my husband prefers Jif so I buy that for him. Side note: I go through my jars of peanut butter MUCH quicker than he does. It’s probably a 3:1 ratio ha. While I haven’t tried this since my love of peanut butter and chocolate is so strong, if you have a peanut allergy or simply want to use another nut butter, any nut/seed butter (almond, cashew, sunflower etc.) should work here!

Protein powder

In my original buckeye recipe, I used vanilla protein powder which served two purposes: thickener and sweetener. Most typical buckeye recipes use powdered sugar to sweeten/thicken the peanut butter filling.

As mentioned, to make the filling chocolate I obviously used chocolate protein powder instead of vanilla. Please note two things about the protein powder:

1. You need to make sure you like the taste of your protein powder! If you use a terrible protein powder than you obviously probably won’t like these. I list my fav protein powder recommendations here.
2. Different protein powders have different consistencies. I have found plant-based protein powders to typically be thicker than whey-based protein powders. If you use a whey protein, you may likely need about 4 tablespoons instead of 3. I’d recommend starting with less as you can always add more until you get a cookie-dough like consistency that you can roll into balls.

Cocoa powder

I prefer using dark/dutch-process cocoa powder here, which gives these a deeper, richer, dark chocolate/brownie-like flavor. However, you can also use regular cocoa powder or cacao powder. I like adding the cocoa powder in addition to the chocolate protein powder for a stronger chocolate taste and darker color.