Rum Balls

Happy Hanukkah, Ballston!!! And Happy Cookie Week!!! This has been a great time in our apartment: nothing is better than having your place consistently smell like cookies!! It hasn't been the best week on our waistlines, but still: can't complain too much.

I finally came up with a rum ball recipe that I like. FINALLY. I love rum. I love cookies. I love rum cake. But I've never liked rum balls. They always seemed to be too potent, too messy, or not enough chocolate for me. However,  I think I've come up with a great, slightly unique recipe that you will fall in love with. Dieters beware: This is not a cookie for calorie counters. If you're looking for something you won't want to punish yourself for later, try the from a few days ago.

We used some leftover pecans from November's pecan month on the and the cookie part of Oreos. Most recipes ask for chocolate wafer cookies to be blended up in their rum balls. My husband suggested trying Oreos (primarily so he could snag a couple of them when I wasn't looking) and it turned out to be a GREAT idea! The ingredients are very similar, and so it was an easy substitution (even if it did constitute a little extra work. If you use Oreos, you have to remove the filling from between the cookies and throw it away). Anyway-here's my version of chocolate rum balls:

Rum Balls:
Servings-about 4 dozen

Ingredients:
2 of the 3 rows of Oreos from a standard 16 oz package
½ cup powdered sugar
1 cup pecans
½ tsp instant coffee (or a little less than 1 Starbucks Via packet)
⅓ cup dark rum
3 tsp dark corn syrup
2 oz semisweet chocolate, melted
extra powdered sugar to coat rum balls

Directions: 

1) Separate the Oreo cookies from the filling. Discard filling, keep cookies.
2) Pulverize the cookies. This should render right around 2 cups of cookie crumbs.
3) Blend the pecans. These don't need to be as fine as the cookie crumbs, but still blended pretty well.
4) In a large bowl, mix cookie crumbs and pecans.
5) Pour rum into a small bowl. Dissolve coffee in the rum.
6) Add rum mixture and dark corn syrup to large bowl with cookie crumbs and pecans.
7) Roll pieces of dough into balls. Keep them bite sized, just larger than the size of a nickel. Place them on waxed paper, or plates if you forgot to pick up waxed paper at the store...
8) Let stand for about 15 minutes.
9) Place rum balls in a Tupperware container. Pour some powdered sugar in the container, place the lid on the container, and shake the rum balls in the powdered sugar, fully coating each one of them.
10) Place in the fridge. These stay for a couple days.

Rate it!:
Rating: A
Difficulty: Moderately easy
Cost: Roughly $11.00 (the rum jacks the price up a bit, but you really don't use much at all! Maybe $2 worth-which is all I factored in)
Cost per Serving: $0.23/rum ball
Bad Breath Factor: Not terrible-chocolate is great! But smelling like rum isn't ideal. The chocolate is more powerful than rum, though. You should be ok.

Suggestions:
1) Let the rum balls set for the full amount of time (15 minutes)
2) We liked ours completely coated in powdered sugar. Not everyone will like all that sugar, but it made them look like mini snowballs.  Very festive and very yummy. If you don't like that much powdered sugar, simply dust them while they are on the waxed paper. 
3) These ended up a little greasy feeling. I'm not sure if that's due to using Oreos, or if it's for another reason. Coating in powdered sugar (definitely NOT the most healthy solution) fixed that.
4) Standard chocolate wafers work to. The thing is, they were double the price-and the husband loves oreos, so we tried it out. Glad we did! I little more initial work (with the separating of the cookie from the filling) but it was really good!
5) Don't eat the filling from the cookies. It's tempting, I know-but really...it will make you feel awful!

I really liked these! They had a great texture, the rum didn't end up being too overpowering at all, and the Oreos worked GREAT! Let me know if you try them out, or feel free to share your favorite version of this recipe!

Our next cookie is going to be a mint chocolate cookie that we tried out a few days ago. Best cookie I have ever made. Check back in a couple days for that recipe-you'll be glad you did!