Well-spent Thursday

Most of Thursday was involved with making rumballs. You make them well before Christmas to allow them to ripen. Here's the basic recipe:

Roxie's Rum Balls

6 oz choc chips (1 C.)
1/2 C. sugar
3 Tbs light corn syrup
1/2 C. rum
2 1/2 C finely crushed vanilla wafers (appx 1 box. Nabisco tastes the best.)

Melt choc chips . Add sugar and corn syrup. Mix. Add rum and cookie crumbs. Mix thouroughly and form into small balls. Allow to ripen in an air tight tin at least several days.

No baking. The hard part is shaping all those little balls. I bought a tiny ice cream scoop and saved myself hours of work and mess.

I mix everything in a big tupperware bowl. That way, I just dump in the chocolate chips, and stick the whole thing in the microwave to melt them. Saves cleaning the double boiler.

You really need to crush the heck out of those wafers. You could open a box of them, dump them into the tea towel embroidered with the lecherous coffeepot leering at the coy teapot by your dear aunt Honoria, fold the towel into a package, and let your three-year-old work the whole thing over with a rolling pin.

Or you could open three boxes, dump them into the pillowcase embroidered with multi-colored roses by your dear aunt Plethora, gather the top closed, and let your teenager smash it against a door frame till it stops going crunch.

Or, you could get the king-sized tie-dyed bedspread embroidered with orange and turquoise dancing bears by your dear aunt Euphoria, dump in ten boxes of cookies, fold up the edges, secure with bungie cords, and let your husband's troup of Morris dancers go crazy on it for a full rehearsal.

I never make less than a double batch of these. A meat grinder is my weapon of choice when it comes to crushing those cookies, since I often make double quadruple batches, and that's a LOT of cookies to crush. (8 boxfulls) This time around, it was a triple quadruple batch, divided into various flavors. Cookie crushing will burn out your blender in no time flat. It nearly burned out my whole right arm.

DON'T BE STINGY WITH THE RUM!!!

Various flavors you ask? Instead of rum use Grand Mariner, or Framboise, or Amoretto, or Drambuie, or Bourbon, or add a tablespoon of cinnamon to a batch. I made two alcohol-free batches, one with raspberry jam, and one with orange-juice concentrate.

For shipping, I usually just pack them into a tin, seal it with packing tape, and slap a lable on the top. Both Paul and Dave commented that this was odd. Howcum? Is it not a good thing to do? How should I ship them? I want to do it right, folks, and my ignorance is vast.

No pictures. Bowls full of chocolate goo look just like bowls full of chocolate goo. One inch balls of chocolate goo look like a herd of very small ponies has wandered by.

One year, when my father-in-law was still alive, I made a batch with coconut instead of cookies, and white chocolate. For a coconut afficianado, it was bliss!

If you come up with cookie-crushing alternatives, I would love to hear them.