What Are Those Chocolate Balls Called?

The direct answer depends on what you remember seeing. If the chocolate ball had chocolate sprinkles on the outside and a soft, fudgy center, it's almost certainly a brigadeiro from Brazil. If it was rolled in coconut, you might have been eating a Swedish chokladboll or kokosboll. If a peanut butter center was peeking through the chocolate, that's an American buckeye candy. And if it had a cream-based filling inside a chocolate shell, you were probably looking at a truffle or a bon bon. "Chocolate ball" isn't really a name at all - it's just what people say when they don't know the real one, and that's exactly what we're fixing today.

Start Here: What Was on the Outside?

Before diving into history and texture, here's the quick version organized by what you actually saw:

• Rolled in chocolate sprinkles, soft and fudgy inside: brigadeiro (Brazil)
• Rolled in shredded coconut or coated in chocolate with chopped nuts, made from oats and cocoa: chokladboll or kokosboll (Sweden)
• Dipped in chocolate with a peanut butter center showing at the top: buckeye candy (United States)
• Smooth ganache center dusted in cocoa powder: chocolate truffle
• Solid or filled chocolate shell, any flavor, sold individually or boxed: bon bon
• Wafer, hazelnut, and chocolate layered in a wrapped shell: Ferrero Rocher or similar brand confections

If one of these jumped out at you, you have your answer. If you want the full story (and the genuinely interesting history of the most popular one), keep reading.

Brigadeiro: The Brazilian Chocolate Ball

I make these for a living, so let me start here. A brigadeiro is a round, fudgy Brazilian treat made from sweetened condensed milk, cocoa powder, and butter, cooked on the stove until it thickens into something close to thick chocolate fudge, then rolled by hand into small balls and coated in chocolate sprinkles. It's the single most common answer to "what are the chocolate balls called," and if you grew up anywhere near a Brazilian household, a Brazilian bakery, or a Brazilian birthday party, you've eaten one.

Where the Name Comes From

The name has real history behind it. "Brigadeiro" means "brigadier" in Portuguese, and the dessert takes its name from Eduardo Gomes, a Brazilian Air Force brigadier who ran for president in 1945. According to Brazilian culinary historians, his supporters sold the chocolate treat to raise money for his campaign, and the dessert adopted his military title as its name. Gomes lost the election, but the treat named after him became a permanent part of Brazilian life, which is honestly a better consolation prize than most people get. You can read more about the broader category of rolled chocolate confections, including brigadeiro, on Wikipedia's entry on chocolate balls.

If you want the longer version of this story, including how the recipe spread from political fundraiser to everyday dessert, this deeper dive into Brazilian chocolate balls covers the history in more detail than fits here.

What Goes Into a Brigadeiro

A real brigadeiro has very few ingredients, and that simplicity is the whole point:

That's it. No eggs, no flour, no baking. It cooks on the stovetop, cools down, gets rolled by hand, and gets coated. Some modern versions use condensed milk alternatives or swap sprinkles for nuts, fruit, or coffee, but the formula above is what you'll find in traditional recipes.

How Brigadeiro Tastes and Feels

Texture is where most home recipes go wrong, so it's worth being specific. A properly made brigadeiro should hold its shape when you pick it up but give easily when you bite into it - somewhere between soft fudge and thick chocolate ganache, never grainy, never stiff. The outside has a little resistance from the sprinkles before your teeth reach that smooth interior. When a batch is undercooked, it's too soft to roll. When overcooked, it turns gummy and chewy instead of melting on the tongue. Getting that timing right is honestly most of the skill involved in making them, which is why the stovetop takes more attention than the ingredient list does.

Why Brigadeiro Matters at Brazilian Celebrations

In Brazil, a birthday table without brigadeiro would look incomplete to most guests, the way a table without cake would feel incomplete in other places. They show up at kids' parties, weddings, baby showers, and pretty much any celebration that calls for something sweet and shareable. That cultural weight is part of why gifting a box of brigadeiros carries more meaning than handing over a generic box of chocolate. If you're shopping for an occasion like that, a birthday brigadeiro gift box leans directly into that tradition.

Chokladboll and Kokosboll: The Swedish Chocolate Balls

Sweden has its own no-bake chocolate ball, and it's genuinely different from a brigadeiro, even though people often search for them together. A chokladboll is a Swedish no-bake treat made from oats, sugar, cocoa, butter, and usually a splash of coffee, rolled into balls and coated in pearl sugar, chocolate sprinkles, or shredded coconut. When it's rolled in coconut specifically, it's often called a kokosboll (plural kokosbollar), which translates literally to "coconut ball."

One thing worth knowing: this dessert used to carry an offensive name in Sweden tied to a racial slur, a fact documented in food writing and acknowledged publicly in Sweden, including by food companies that renamed their products. The name "chokladboll" became the standard replacement starting in the 2000s, and it's a real piece of the dessert's history that Swedish publications and bakeries have been direct about correcting.

What's in a Chokladboll

• Rolled oats
• Sugar
• Cocoa powder
• Softened butter
• Brewed coffee or vanilla sugar
• Coating of pearl sugar, chocolate sprinkles, or shredded coconut

How It's Different From Brigadeiro

The base is where the biggest difference lies. Brigadeiro is a cooked condensed-milk fudge with no oats or flour involved at all. Chokladboll is built on raw oats and sugar and is never cooked, which gives it a grainier, denser bite than the smooth, almost custardy texture of a brigadeiro. If what you remember had any oat-like texture or a coffee note, you were eating a chokladboll, not a brigadeiro.

Buckeye Candy: The American Peanut Butter Chocolate Ball

If the chocolate ball in your memory had a tan, peanut-buttery center peeking through at the top, you're thinking of a buckeye candy, an American treat named after the nut of the Ohio buckeye tree, which the candy resembles. It's made from a stiff peanut butter and powdered sugar filling, rolled into balls, dipped in melted chocolate, and left with a small circle of the peanut butter center exposed on top - that's the signature look, and it's intentional, not sloppy dipping. Buckeyes are especially popular in the American Midwest, particularly Ohio, where the tradition connects to Ohio State University sports culture as much as to the holiday dessert table.

Buckeyes and brigadeiros share almost nothing beyond round shape and chocolate exterior. One is peanut butter and sugar; the other is condensed milk and cocoa. If you grew up in the Midwest rolling peanut butter balls with your grandmother around the holidays, that forum post you might have stumbled across asking "what are these chocolate balls with sprinkles called" was probably describing a buckeye, not a brigadeiro - unless sprinkles, not peanut butter, were the main coating you remember.

Truffles, Bon Bons, and Other Chocolate Cousins

Two more terms get thrown around loosely, and they deserve a clean distinction since people often use them interchangeably when they're not quite the same thing.

A chocolate truffle is a confection built around ganache - a mixture of chocolate and cream - rolled into a ball and typically finished with cocoa powder dust, though some get dipped in a thin chocolate shell instead. The name comes from the dessert's rough, round shape, which resembles the fungus of the same name.

A bon bon, by contrast, usually refers to a small molded chocolate with a defined outer shell and a filling that can be ganache, caramel, fruit cream, or liqueur, typically sold individually or boxed as an assortment rather than rolled by hand.

Separating the Three: Brigadeiro, Truffle, and Bon Bon

Here's the cleanest way to tell them apart, since this is one of the most common follow-up questions:

The short version: a truffle is defined by its ganache center, a bon bon by its molded shell, and a brigadeiro by its condensed-milk fudge base and sprinkle coating. None of them are wrong to call "a chocolate ball," they're just different treats wearing the same general shape.

Branded Chocolate Balls: Ferrero Rocher and Maltesers

Packaged chocolate also comes in ball form, and two brands come up constantly in related searches. Ferrero Rocher, made by the Italian company Ferrero, layers a whole hazelnut, hazelnut cream, and a wafer shell inside a coating of milk chocolate and chopped hazelnuts, then wraps each piece in gold foil. Maltesers, made by Mars, are lighter and crunchier, built around a malted milk center with an airy, honeycomb-like texture inside a thin milk chocolate shell, and they're usually sold loose in a bag rather than individually wrapped.

Both are genuinely chocolate balls by shape, and both are manufactured at scale rather than hand-rolled, which is the main thing separating them from brigadeiro, chokladboll, buckeye, and truffle. None of them use condensed milk, oats, peanut butter, or cream ganache as their base, so they're their own category: wafer-and-nut confections built for shelf life and mass production, not for a dessert table at a family celebration.

Quick Reference: Chocolate Ball Names at a Glance

Are Chocolate Balls Actually Healthy?

No round chocolate confection is a health food, and nobody is eating a brigadeiro or a truffle for the nutrition label. But there's a real range worth knowing about. A single brigadeiro, roughly the size of a quarter, runs somewhere around 60 to 90 calories depending on size and chocolate content, since the main ingredients are condensed milk, cocoa, and butter in small portions. Buckeyes tend to run higher in fat per piece because of the peanut butter and the full chocolate coating. Mass-produced options like Ferrero Rocher or Maltesers carry added preservatives and stabilizers for shelf stability that hand-rolled treats don't need, since those get eaten within days of being made, not months.

The honest answer: they're all treats meant to be eaten in small portions and enjoyed rather than relied on for anything nutritional. If you're trying to compare specific calorie or sugar counts, check the label or the maker's published nutrition information directly, since recipes and portion sizes vary enough that a general number isn't reliable for anyone managing sugar intake closely.

Identify the Chocolate Ball You're Thinking Of

If you've read this far and still aren't sure, run through this quick checklist based on what you actually remember about the outside and inside:

1. Coated in chocolate sprinkles and soft all the way through? You're thinking of a brigadeiro.
2. Coated in shredded coconut, or did it feel slightly grainy or oat-like? You're thinking of a chokladboll or kokosboll.
3. Had a tan center showing through the chocolate on top? You're thinking of a buckeye candy.
4. Dusted in cocoa powder with a soft, almost melty center? You're thinking of a truffle.
5. Came individually wrapped or in a hard shell from a bag or box? You're thinking of a bon bon or a branded chocolate like Ferrero Rocher or Maltesers.

If more than one of these rings a bell, that's normal. A lot of people have eaten more than one version of this treat over the years without ever learning there were different names attached to each.

Where to Find Real Brigadeiros

I roll brigadeiros by hand in small batches in Miami, and the texture difference between a fresh one and a shelf-stable packaged version is not subtle. A fresh brigadeiro should still have a slight give when you press it, and the sprinkles should still have a little snap to them rather than going soft from sitting too long. That's the whole reason small-batch matters: this isn't a treat built for a long shelf life, it's built to be eaten within days of being made.

If you've never tried one and want to taste what we've been describing rather than just reading about it, a milk chocolate brigadeiro gift box is a straightforward starting point. If you want variety, the chocolate lovers assortment mixes dark and milk chocolate versions in one box. And if you're shopping for someone specific rather than yourself, it helps to think about what actually makes a chocolate gift feel special instead of generic, since a box of hand-rolled brigadeiros reads very differently from a drugstore chocolate assortment picked up on the way to the party.

If you're sending instead of handing it over in person, it's worth reading up on how to send chocolate as a gift without it feeling like an afterthought, especially around shipping and timing so the treats arrive in the condition they were made in, not melted or stale. And for workplace gifting specifically, there's a real difference between a box that gets eaten and one that gets left in the break room, which is covered in our piece on corporate chocolate gifts clients actually remember.

Here's a short video that captures the Swedish side of this naming story well, including the renaming history mentioned earlier.

Questions People Actually Ask

What do you call those chocolate balls?

Most commonly, they're called brigadeiros if they're Brazilian and rolled in chocolate sprinkles. Depending on the coating and filling, they might also be chokladboll, kokosboll, buckeye candy, truffle, or bon bon.

Are chocolate sprinkles called jimmies?

In parts of the United States, especially the Northeast, chocolate sprinkles are often called jimmies, while in other regions and most of the rest of the world, "sprinkles" is the standard term for both chocolate and rainbow versions.

Are chocolate balls healthy?

Not in any meaningful nutritional sense; they're a dessert meant to be enjoyed in small portions, though hand-rolled versions made with simple ingredients like condensed milk and cocoa tend to carry fewer additives than mass-produced packaged alternatives.

What's the difference between a bon bon and a truffle?

A truffle is defined by its ganache (chocolate and cream) center and is usually dusted in cocoa powder, while a bon bon is defined by its molded outer chocolate shell and can be filled with almost anything, from caramel to fruit cream to liqueur.

What are these chocolate balls called in English?

In English, the most widely recognized name for the Brazilian version is "brigadeiro," borrowed directly from Portuguese, since there's no exact English equivalent for the specific condensed-milk fudge texture it has.

What is a Swedish chocolate ball's old name?

Swedish chocolate balls were historically known by a name considered a racial slur, which Swedish bakeries and food brands have since phased out in favor of "chokladboll" starting in the 2000s.

Can you buy brigadeiros instead of making them?

Yes, and for a lot of people that's the better option, since getting the stovetop timing right takes practice. Handcrafted brigadeiro makers, including small-batch kitchens like ours, ship ready-made boxes so you can skip the trial-and-error entirely.

Whatever you call the treat you've been picturing this whole time, I hope you've landed on its real name by now. And if that name turned out to be brigadeiro, you're in good company: it's one of the most quietly beloved treats in the world, named after a man who lost an election but somehow won dessert history anyway.

Sources

• Chocolate balls, Wikipedia
• Ferrero Rocher, official site
• Maltesers, official site
• Sprinkle+Bean