I can’t remember the last time I made these but I was reminded of them recently, when I visited a local European grocery store. They were charging $2.99 per piece for the large size. I was horrified, and since I had just restocked my supply of rum, I made a quick half batch today. The recipe was shared with me by my BFF, Ann, more than 50 years ago, from her family recipes.
I didn’t have much in the way of items to roll the rum balls in so I made do with scraps from my baking supplies. I had less than a tablespoon of two different kinds of candy shot so I rolled the rest of the balls in finely chopped walnuts and icing sugar.
Ann’s Rum Balls – makes 7 dozen 1″ balls**
2 x 7 oz (200 gm) pkgs chocolate wafers (1 box of Oreo baking crumbs)
1 cup walnuts or pecans, finely chopped
1 cup sifted icing sugar
1/2 cup corn syrup
1/4 cup cocoa, sifted
1/2 cup rum, light or dark
Additional icing sugar for rolling.
Crush wafers to equal 4 1/2 cups. Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. Let stand at room temperature for 10 min. Coat hands in icing sugar and roll the mixture into small (~1″ diameter) balls.
Decorate balls by rolling in icing sugar or chocolate shot. Best if aged for a week before eating them so they become truffle like and the rum flavour mellows a bit.
May be frozen but also keep well in an air tight container in a cool place.
** Half batch made 16 balls. I used a 1 inch melon baller.
Tag Archives: chocolate
Toffee Bars
I’m planning on making these toffee bars again and while reviewing the recipe, I realized that I had never shared the pictures or the recipe link.I recommend making them if you need a fast recipe with little preparation. Sadly, they don’t last long especially when you only make a small 8×8 inch tray.
Happy Thanksgiving (2019)
Happy Thanksgiving!!
Happy Belated National Chocolate Cake Day (Jan. 27, 2019)
I recently commented on Dolly’s “koolkosherkitchen” blog that her National Chocolate Cake Day post made me want to make/eat some chocolate cake and she responded with “So go for it – it only takes a minute!”. Well, the recipe that I used took a bit longer than a minute but the resulting cake was rich and chocolatey and pretty easy to make.
Although the recipe title says it’s a cake for one, on reading the post you’ll see that she recommends splitting the batter among two mini pans. Do it. You’ll be glad you did cause the batter really puffs up. And make twice as much of the frosting using the link at the bottom of the page. I have one cup ramekins so that’s what I used to bake the cake in. If you don’t … use an empty tuna can that you’ve washed thoroughly. Remove the label.
Chocolate buttercream frosting
Pour yourself a big glass of cold milk and dig in.
REVIEW: It’s delicious.
Happy Halloween 2018
Thought I’d post a Halloween themed dessert … chocolate panna cotta garnished with chocolate meringue “bones”.
Presented by my friendly, home made witch. Who really deserves a name.
Ideas?
Happy Halloween!!
“Cake in a Mug” Duo
A few years ago I ran across a wonderful post on Diethood which had links to a collection of microwaved ‘cakes in a mug’. I copied several of the recipes and even made one … a “Strawberries and Cream” version. I served it with some macerated strawberries on top.
It was tasty but, for some reason, I never tried any of the other recipes in the collection I saved. Until this week.
By the way, I heartily recommend checking out Katerina’s blog. She’s a talented home chef, wife and mother of two young girls, and a beautiful person, inside and out.
Chocolate and Peanut Butter ‘Cake in a Mug’
Chocolate and Peanut Butter ‘Cake in a Mug’ – makes 1 cake
Dry ingredients: 1 tbsp all purpose flour, 1 tbsp cocoa, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tbsp brown sugar
Wet ingredients: 1 egg, 2 tbsp of peanut butter
Add ins: 1 tbsp chocolate chips
In a small mixing bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Add the wet ingredients and combine. Add the chocolate chips, giving the ‘batter’ a quick stir.
Pour the batter into a mug. Make sure that your batter only fills about 1/3 of the mug because it will rise A LOT.
Place the mug into the microwave and cook for 1 min 45 sec or 2 min on 80 % power.
Trial 1: Cake cooked for 2 minutes. Good texture (maybe a touch too firm) and taste. I’ll try 1 min 45 sec next time.
Blueberry ‘Cake in a Mug’
Blueberry ‘Cake in a Mug’ – makes 1 cake
Dry ingredients: 5 tbsp all purpose flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 3-4 tbsp granulated sugar
Wet ingredients: 1 egg, 2 tbsp blueberry yogurt, 1 tbsp vegetable oil, 1 tsp vanilla extract
Add ins: 2 tbsp frozen or fresh blueberries
In a small mixing bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Add the wet ingredients and combine. Add the blueberries, giving the ‘batter’ a quick stir.
Pour the batter into a mug. Make sure that your batter only fills about 1/3 of the mug because it will rise A LOT.
Place the mug into the microwave and cook for 1 min 45 sec or 2 min on 80 % power.
Trial 1: Cake cooked for 1 min 45 sec. Texture of the cake was very good, more tender compared to the slightly tougher one of the chocolate and peanut butter one that was cooked longer.
Crumb of the cake
I split open the ‘cake’ to see the distribution of the frozen blueberries. Everything was great UNTIL I tasted it and realized that I had forgotten to add the sugar.
So I poured the rest of the container of blueberry yogurt over the top and dug in. A tablespoon of sweetened whipped cream would have worked too. Or maybe some honey.
Rigo Jancsi … a Hungarian Chocolate Mousse Cake
Sometimes you just get inspired by a recipe, even when you don’t have enough of the ingredients to make a full recipe. Or the right sized container to assemble it in.
There’s a sad and romantic story about the purported origin of this chocolate mousse cake, involving a gypsy violinist and the unhappily married wife of an impoverished Belgian prince. I just made it because I had a chocolate craving and was bored on a Saturday afternoon. The recipe was found on the blog “Zsuzsa in the Kitchen”, the source of many delicious Hungarian and Canadian recipes.
You may see this cake with a white whipped cream layer between the chocolate mousse and the cake top. It’s a nice visual but not found in the original version, I understand.
I was low on eggs and only had a couple of teaspoons of gelatin for the mousse so I scaled down … everything.
The cake (a half batch) was made in an eight by eight inch glass pan and then cut in half, rather unevenly, as it turned out. Mostly because I was distracted by the lumps of unmixed egg white foam in the chocolate batter. I made one third portions of both the mousse filling and the chocolate glaze for the cake top. The mousse melted in the heat of my kitchen as I incorporated the warm cream containing the gelatin into the cold whipped chocolate cream. And, since I didn’t have a pan of the right size to build the cake and mousse filling in, I piled the mounds of chocolate mousse on the slab of cake in a couple of batches, refrigerating the cake in between.
Diluted and slightly warmed apricot jam spread over the base of the cake. Chocolate mousse piled on top.
The chocolate ganache used to glaze the cake top turned out beautifully. Glossy and just thick enough to set quickly, so I could precut the cake layers before piling them on top of the mousse. Unfortunately, by this point it had set firmly enough that the two didn’t glue themselves together. It was at that point that I realized that I hadn’t trimmed the two cake layers to match.
Oh well … it wasn’t being made to serve to company.
Rushing to get the cake assembled and back into the fridge to set, led me to only cut the mousse cake into six portions, even though I HAD planned for eight. No matter, as I ate two servings, even as wonky as they turned out, that same day. Midnight chocolate mousse cake is a decadent treat we should all indulge in periodically.
Pantry/Freezer Clearout – Chocolate Digestive Biscuits
It’s always fun when you have all the ingredients for something that catches your eye.
I saw these delicious looking biscuits on one of the FB food groups I belong to. When I checked out the link I found that the recipe used whole wheat flour and fine porridge oats and not all purpose flour. I happened to have some leftover finely ground rolled oats, from a previous sourdough bread bake, in my pantry, so it was a win-win situation. Cookies/biscuits AND it used up another item from my pantry. The recipe, as posted by Paul Hollywood, seems to be similar to the McVitie brand of biscuits.
Paul Hollywood’s Chocolate Digestive Biscuits
Review: Just a touch of sweetness. I used a 72% dark cocoa chocolate for the coating but if you want something sweeter, a milk chocolate would be tasty as well.
Sometimes, my cooking choice is designed around using up a specific ingredient. Like the cream of wheat dumplings (Hungarian grizgaluska) I made with the last 3/4 cup of cream of wheat in my pantry. And the pot of chicken stock made with a chicken carcass, a few chicken backs and about a dozen chicken thigh bones that I ran across, as I was transferring the contents of the upstairs freezer to the basement one. I served the dumplings in the resulting soup.
Sweet Potato Buns (and Looking at the Dough NOT the Clock)
I recently saw a post on one of my bread making FB groups about making potato bread/buns … and I was intrigued.
So, this past long weekend, I went down into the basement for the last six Yukon gold potatoes that I had …
… only to have a second thought based on the presence of a LARGE sweet potato in the shoe caddy hanging at the top of the stairs into the basement.
The result was eight HUGE moist and tender buns. (I used “Chef John’s” Sweet Potato Bun recipe from the All-recipes website.)
Crumb of the sweet potato buns
NOTE: On line recipes are sometimes a crap shoot when it comes to the detail of the instructions given, or lack thereof. In this particular case, the proofing times were way off. It took my dough one hour to rise to the top of the bowl NOT the two hours that the recipe claimed. Only the dinner plate covering the top of the bowl prevented a spill over. And my kitchen wasn’t even particularly warm … barely 72 deg F.
Based on that, I watched the final proofing time carefully. It took half an hour for the buns to have doubled in size. Since I had something else in the oven already, I threw the baking tray with the buns into the fridge until I was ready to bake them.
Looks like ‘someone’ was nibbling on that warm buttered bun. 🙂
REVIEW: Soft and tender buns with a bit of sweetness. Beautiful golden colour. The size though … well, when they said LARGE, they meant large. I used 115-120 gm of dough per bun. I’d scale that back to 95-100 gm next time which should give me ten buns and not the eight I ended up with. And I’d definitely make this recipe again.
Here’s another case of a recipe that didn’t QUITE work as expected.
Mocha cookies sounded pretty amazing when I ran across them on a recent web search. And the pictures made my mouth water. I followed the instructions carefully. Butter at room temperature. I even weighed it. Egg at room temperature. And I have a light and consistent hand when measuring flour. My oven is calibrated properly and it was preheated long enough that I knew it was accurate. I was surprised that the recipe said it only made FOURTEEN cookies but used a soup spoon to measure out the dough. The resulting balls were about two inches in diameter so I decided to scale them back to one inch in diameter, made the fourteen cookie balls and prepared to watch the timing so they wouldn’t burn.
SURPRISE
I ended up with little marbles.
They didn’t spread AT ALL even after I gave them an extra couple of minutes of baking time.
I still had a bit over half the cookie dough left so I weighed it, and divided the dough into EIGHT (46 gm) portions. The first batch of cookie balls had all sorts of cracks and imperfections after they baked so I made sure that these cookied balls were perfectly smooth, pre-baking. I took a good look at the dough balls before I put them in the oven and they looked HUGE. Since I didn’t want GIANT marbles, I decided to dip the base of a coffee mug into granulated sugar and flatten the dough balls.
NOTE: For some reason I didn’t think to increase the baking temperature from the 350 deg Fahrenheit in the recipe to 375 deg for this second batch.
The cookies still didn’t spread but the resulting cookies were more ‘cookie-like’ in shape. And like the first batch, they were soft.
REVIEW: The cookies were tasty though I think they were missing … something … taste-wise. I don’t think I’d make this recipe again.
BBQ and Mint Chimichurri
I’ve had a beef/steak craving for a while and picked up a couple of rib steaks (cap off), as well as a tray of pork chops, also on sale this week, with a plan to barbecue. Unfortunately, with Friday and Saturday’s rain and thunderstorms, it took a post-supper lull on Saturday before I could finally throw a few things on the grill.
There’s nothing like chimichurri to dress a bbq’d steak or pork chops. I’ve used cilantro, mint and parsley to make it, in the past, but this batch just used mint and parsley. And for a veggie side … steamed artichokes with a chipotle yum yum sauce (leftovers) to dip into. I’ll share the pictures in a separate post
Mint Chimichurri – makes about 2/3 of a cup
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped (about 2 teaspoons)
1 cup fresh mint (spearmint) leaves, packed
1 cup fresh Italian parsley leaves, packed
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp Kosher or coarse sea salt
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
6 tbsp olive oil**
** I used extra virgin olive oil since that’s all I had.
Place garlic in the bowl of a food processor and pulse several times until finely chopped. Add the mint and parsley leaves and pulse until finely chopped.
In a medium sized bowl, add the vinegar, salt, and red pepper flakes and stir until the salt has dissolved. Add the mint-parsley mixture and stir until well mixed. Stir in the olive oil.
Transfer to a glass jar, seal and refrigerate. The chimichurri will keep for several days in the refrigerator.
Perfect to serve over steak, lamb or even roasted potatoes!
Steak, potatoes and mint chimichurri – I put the chimichurri on the potatoes for visual contrast though it’s generally served on top of your grilled meat.
Dessert was a couple of large cream puffs filled with chocolate Chantilly cream
Mixed bbq grill – Rib steak, Yukon gold potatoes, a package of hot dogs and a couple of pork chops
Cooking is Fun ... Really!! 