Long before I ever tried oysters on the half shell or oyster shooters or fried oysters, there were whipped oysters. I don’t think I knew what a real oyster was when I was a kid, but I knew we made this candy every year. I have no idea why these treats were called oysters. They don’t resemble an oyster. I can’t find out much about whipped oysters online and found only one recipe that was similar to our family recipe, but it seems like this was an ultra-local northeastern Wisconsin specialty. Not that I grew up in that part of Wisconsin. Go figure!

This is a recipe card I made while I was a teenager that shows the recipe that my family uses. Hey, whip some cream, dump in some melted chocolate, roll in nuts! Easy! Well, it is pretty easy, but I took some photos and added some notes below.

I melted a pound of chocolate in the double boiler. I used a mix of semi-sweet chocolate and some chocolate almond bark I had. I thought I remembered using almond bark as a kid. I didn’t even know that wasn’t really even chocolate back then. Just like I didn’t know these weren’t really oysters!

I kind of wish I’d used all semi-sweet or combined it with another higher-end chocolate. I mean, almond bark is cheap for a reason, right? Also, these came out really sweet. I would have liked to use a darker chocolate to cut that down a bit.

While the chocolate was cooling I whipped the cream until it was stiff.

After the cream is stiff and the chocolate has cooled a little bit, fold the chocolate into the whipped cream. This is a little tricky. I was trying to combine these, but didn’t want to break the whipped cream down. Later on I found a ribbon of pure chocolate in my mix, so I guess I didn’t do so great of a job. Not sure if I should have left the cream bowl on the mixer and pured the chocolate in while it was beating, or what the best method is. Maybe the whipped cream won’t break down anyway. Not sure.

After you mix the chocolate and whipped cream together, put it in the fridge. The recipe I saw online made it seem like this mixture is finicky and said to refrigerate it for 5-30 minutes until it has a “chiffon texture.” It even recommended checking on it every 5 minutes. My recipe said to refrigerate overnight. I probably refrigerated for 24 hours, just because I didn’t have a chance to get to it before then.

Take the chocolate mixture out of the refrigerator. You need to roll it into balls. We used to just use a teaspoon to do this, and that would work fine, but I decided to use my small cookie scoop to make uniformly sized balls. So I first scooped out all of the chocolate and then rolled them between my hands to make them more ball-like. If you need to, refrigerate the scoops before rolling them. These have a tendency to melt easily and stick to your hands. Make your balls small. They’re rich. Two bites is plenty big (or one big bite!). Just as a note, I made 50 oysters from this batch.

After you have your balls made, roll them in chopped nuts. I used roasted and salted almonds because I thought that the crunchiness and saltiness would be a good contrast to the sweet and smooth oysters. I was right!

After you roll the balls in the nuts, return them to the trays and refrigerate. After these are set, put them in storage containers, with clean waxed paper between layers. You need to store these in the fridge. They’ll stay good for a long time, like a week or two, but the nuts are the crunchiest if they’re served within a few days.

Cross section of an oyster. Overall, these are pretty easy to make and very tasty! Try your hand at this Wisconsin specialty!