Happy Leap Day!
In honor of this very special "bonus" day, I'm bringing you a very special recipe--one of Mr. K's top secret recipes he makes annually to give out during the Christmas season. He's been making rum balls for his family for years, and they're hit with everyone who tries them. His standard recipe calls for regular cocoa and spiced rum (like Captain Morgan's), but this year he experimented and used dark cocoa and dark rum (Meyers) for one of the batches. The dark rum definitely adds a stronger boozy yummy rummy flavor to the mix!
Pecan Rum Balls
Yield: 3-4 dozen, depending on size
12 oz. package vanilla wafers
1 cup pecan bits
1 1/2 Tbl. cocoa powder
2 Tbl. Steen's Cane Syrup (can use corn syrup, but it's not quite the same)
3 oz. spiced rum or dark rum
powdered sugar for rolling
Crush vanilla wafers in a food processor. Add pecan bits and process again to a fine crumb texture. Mix in cocoa powder. Transfer to a 1 gallon zip top bag. Stir together syrup and rum, then add to crumb mixture in bag. Seal bag and use your hands to work the liquid into the crumbs. You will end up with a mixture that is similar to damp sand--it will hold together if you squeeze some in your hand, but it will fall apart if you try to roll a ball with your hands. Mixture may be used now, or allowed to rest overnight.
Using your fingers, pinch off a small portion of the mixture and press it into a ball shape. Aim for a 1 or 2-bite size ball, about 1" across. Once all the mixture is used, return the rum balls to the zip top bag and add a bit of powdered sugar. Seal bag and gently work the bag to coat the rum balls in powdered sugar. Depending on the humidity and how moist the rum balls are, they may absorb all the sugar. If that's the case, just add more sugar and continue coating the rum balls. (The ones pictured above have 2 or 3 coats of sugar on them.)
Our Church is holding a bake sale this weekend to help raise funds for our Easter mission trip to General Cepeda, Mexico...and of course I had to join in on the fun! I don't know about you, but I just love--no, make that LOVE--bake sales :) Pictured above are: (clockwise, from upper left) Brownie bites, Neapolitan Bundt cake, Marshmallow Krispie Treats, Pretzel Kisses, Lemon Bundts, Pretzel Hugs, and Eggnog Bundts. Yum!
My sister and I have been on a cake ball kick lately, and I decided to take the plunge and try my hand at making Bakerella's original Cupcake Bites. These are similar to the ones I previously made, but without the peanut butter cup-like bottom. We couldn't find the correct size of flower-shaped cookie cutter that was called for in the tutorial, until Diana happened upon some in the scrapbooking section of Hobby Lobby. Go figure. I actually did find the cutters at Williams-Sonoma, but the set was...pricey.
I made a minty green cake by adding mint extract and green food coloring to a box of white cake mix, which I naively assumed would stay the same beautiful green color when baked. Well lo and behold, the exterior of the cake baked up a wonderful, beautiful shade of...golden brown. Which is all fine and dandy until I started crumbling the cake. The resulting pile looked like a dirty speckled mess of green and brown. Yuk. It was nothing few more drops of food coloring couldn't remedy though. Make that tons more drops. Making these required quite a bit of a time commitment, but as I have no life and my weekends are pretty much free I didn't mind it so much. The minty flavor is subtle, which most people seemed to enjoy. I however am more partial to a more pronounced minty punch in the mouth, but overall I am quite pleased with the cuteness of the final product. Kinda like mini mugs of root beer. Which isn't such a horrible idea at all considering the number of root beer flavored cupcakes I've seen floating around the interweb...
I also made a three layered carrot cake, slathered in cream cheese icing and covered in chopped pecans. It was both beautiful and delicious, yet for some reason I did not think to take a picture of it :(
Holy snap. These things are cute. And I don't just mean your ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill cute. These babies are devastatingly adorable.
dev·as·tate
tr.v. dev·as·tat·ed, dev·as·tat·ing, dev·as·tates
1. To lay waste; destroy.
2. To overwhelm; confound; stun
Such a perfect definition, for gazing upon a tray full of these miniature delights would most certainly render a person unconscious. Or at the very least obliterate any feelings of sadness, discontent, or ill-will. Could these possibly be the answer for world peace? You decide.
My sister D. and I collaborated on this little project, which was a little time consuming but well worth the effort. The first few came out kinda...ugly. But we quickly got the hang of it and churned out some pretty little 'cupcakes.' Inside is a strawberry and cream cheese cake ball, topped with white candy coating and resting upon a cup of chocolate bark. Chocolate bark??? Really? You'd think the inventor could've come up with a better name than that.
Anyway, learn how to make your own using Bakerella's tutorial. While you're there, check out the awesomeness that is Bakerella. Oh and you might as well buy a t-shirt or 3.
So I thought it would be fun to take a little break from baking and try my hand at candy-making. Seems fitting enough, since Halloween is just around the corner. Not that I would give these out to any kids because they'd just be thrown in the trash anyway. What a waste.
Turning once more to Allrecipes.com, I found a caramel recipe that sounded good and had a pretty respectable 4.5 stars out of 5 rating. I made out my grocery list and headed to Albertson's. Staring at the dairy case, my mind struggled to see the recipe I printed out not 15 minutes earlier. Did it say "heavy whipping cream" or "whipping cream?" I picked up the heavy version, put it in my basket, and proceeded to the next item on my list, only to return to the dairy aisle and grab the regular whipping cream instead. Once home, I discovered that I actually needed the heavy cream. Drat. No biggie, I'll see what happens. It's 8:15 p.m. and I'm not going back out.
The recipe says to "Monitor the heat of the mixture with a candy thermometer while stirring. When the thermometer reaches 250 degrees F (120 degrees C) remove the pot from the heat." Okay...does that mean stir the whole time, or can I stir occasionally? Too lazy to stand there stirring the entire hour it took to reach the 250 degree mark, I pulled up a kitchen chair and kept an eye on the boiling pot of candy. The other eye was busy watching the season premiere of "CSI."
Okay, so I'm stirring, and watching the little blue line in my candy thermometer rise up slowly, when I notice something unexpected happening: the butter is separating from the mixture. Could this be the result of using regular and not heavy cream? Have I upset the fat ratio, causing the butter to come out of em
ulsion? It's because I didn't stir the whole time, right? I don't know. What I do know is that the 240 degree butter splattering out of your pot hurts. A lot. Proceed with caution, kids. An hour later it finally reached the right temperature, so I poured it into my parchment-lined 11x15-inch pan and left it to cool. It's almost 10 p.m. now, so I was off to bed.
When I got home from work the next day I discovered that the caramel hadn't set up; it was a viscous goo. Tasty goo, but goo nonetheless. Well... maybe my thermometer is off. Me of all people should know that your instruments should be calibrated before you start working with them. So off it goes into a pot of boiling water to check for accuracy. I don't have a mark for 212 deg.F, but it was almost to 215 deg.F after a few minutes in the boiling water bath, so that wasn't the cause of my problem. Drying off the thermometer, I noticed that the handy dandy chart on the back says that "hard ball" stage is 260 deg.F, not the 250 deg.F specified in the recipe. Determined, I scraped the candy back into the pot and cooked to 260 deg.F, stirring the WHOLE TIME. Surely, it has to turn out this time. I poured the caramel into a smaller 9x13-inch pan and waited.
Great success! The next problem to tackle now is wrapping them. Armed with my Cricut (the m
ascot is a cricket. But it's a cutter. So cri-cut. Cricut! Get it? Haha, I am so easily amused!) paper trimmer and a roll of waxed paper, I cut 120 3x3" squares. In total, I cut 165 squares (about 2 cm big), but my sister took some to work and the rest were tasty "casualties." Wrapping them was going to be a tedious task, but oddly enough I like doing tedious things once I get into a rhythm. Popped in a good CD and sat down at my computer desk to wrap candy while chatting with friends online. And I always say I can't do two things at once. ;)
