Thursday, January 24, 2013

2013.01.16 Wednesday (Bacon Rum Ball Recipe)

Trying Chai tea for breakfast.  Interesting, different.

Went out to Taco Bell for lunch.  Meh.

Other than that, pretty regular day.  To spice things up, I'm going to post a little write-up about the bacon rum balls that I prepared over the December Holidays.

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Ingredients:

  • 2.5 cups vanilla wafers (processed into crumbs)
  • 1.0 cups confectioners sugar (powdered sugar)
  • 1.0 cups bacon bits (not fake stuff)
  • 0.25 cups rum (plus/minus some)
  • 2 tbsp cocoa powder
  • 3 tbsp maple syrup

Instructions:
Creating the dry mix:

  • Prepare batches of vanilla wafer crumbs with a food processor.  The finer the better.  Place in moderately sized mixing bowl
  • Add confectioners sugar to mixing bowl.
  • Add cocoa powder to mixing bowl.


Creating the bacon bits:
For the bacon bits, I actually had some bacon already fried up that I was able to use, but I still ended up needing to fry some more.  The bacon actually chops up better if you slightly over-cook it; it looks dry, but not burnt, after letting the pieces sit to drip and cool off.
Smaller batches of bacon slices works best. The food processor will get greasy and slimy looking.  Mmm fatty.
I have never tried pre-made bacon bits, but I would guess their taste is inferior in this recipe due to the already inferior taste before cooking. (I'm picky about bacon.)

Bringing things together:
Add the bacon bits to the dry mix, then mix with a spoon. At this point, the greasy bacon bits will likely make clumps with the dry mix.  I put this mixture back into the food processor to blend; this made the dry mix much more uniform.
Add the maple syrup
Add the rum

At this point, you should have a mixture that is almost like a dough.  The goal is a mix that is close to the consistency of peanut butter, for ball forming.
If the mix is very wet / soupy: sprinkle confectioners sugar to dry things up.
If the mix is slightly too wet: wait for the mix to evaporate some alcohol / soak up liquid.
If the mix is too dry: add more alcohol (yay).

Prepare a small dish of confectioners sugar near your end tray.  This will be used to roll the rum balls around on.  Sugar-coating the balls helps them not stick to each other, and also dries things a bit to make it easier to handle, almost like a seal.

The Messy Mess:
Use a spoon to grab consistent sizes of dough, roll into a ball shape, then roll in your sugar dish, then place in tray. (Repeat this until mixing bowl is empty.)

And now, the pictures.

Ingredients

The dry mix (wafer, sugar, cocoa)
Adding the bacon :-)

The "clumps" from the greasy bacon. (Re-mix this)
Adding the wet ingredients gives this

The final product.  Delicious.



Bonus pic: If you have leftover bacon, make some chocolate-covered bacon.





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