A different type of rum ball
Last year we posted about “don’t eat and drive” rum balls, a family recipe from my dear friend Sarah. This year we tried a different type of rum ball, also instigated by a friend. This time it was our friends Shannon and Malcolm, who invited us to their apartment for a cookie night! (Apparently my family is deficient because we don’t have our own rum ball recipe. I must make do with friends’ recipes. Making cookies with friends… it’s a hard life!)
Eat me!
Shannon and Malcolm have an amazing apartment in San Francisco. Their roofdeck is about 200 feet from Coit Tower which means you see Coit Tower in one direction and amazing views in the other three. I kicked myself for not bringing my camera! We also almost died trying to drive up the hill to their place, but that’s another story. Next time we’ll park at the bottom of the street and walk up. On the plus side, it’s 3 days later and Jason’s car has finally stopped smelling of burnt clutch, so that’s good. Eek!
Here’s Shannon’s recipe:
Dough
- 16 tablespoons unsalted butter (2 sticks), softened but still cool
- 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
- 6 tablespoons light rum
- 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour , sifted
Coating
- 16 tablespoons unsalted butter (2 sticks), melted
- 1 1/2 cups walnuts , finely ground
- 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
- 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
Using stand mixer, mix brown sugar and butter for dough. Add rum and mix. Add flour and mix. Add a little extra flour if necessary until it truly looks “doughy”. Roll the dough into thirty-six 1 inch balls (ours ended up more like 1 1/2″ or 2″ – they came out fine). Put in refrigerator overnight, or freezer for an hour. (We did refrigerator for about half an hour. They came out fine!) Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Then bake dough balls for 15-20 minutes, or until light brown. They should still be soft in the middle but fully cooked on the outside.
Cool cookies for 30 minutes (we didn’t do this either…). In the meantime, set up the coating. Put walnuts in food processor until finally ground. Add sugar and cinnamon. Melt butter in a saucepan. Then, take dough balls and one at a time, dip them in butter and then the coating mixture. Let cool… okay, just eat them!
This recipe called for a lot of downtime, which is not what you want on a Thursday night. We rushed through some of the various cooling steps and they came out fine! Actually they came out great. Yum! I think that since they are baked, the alcohol evaporates from the outer portion of the dough, but the inside remains a little alcholic. So… don’t worry, you can drive after eating these. Even on San Francisco hills! (Well, I can’t. But that has nothing to do with the rum.)
Okay, I totally failed to get a picture from Shannon and Malcolm’s awesome roof deck. Instead, here’s a picture from our front window in Fremont. It’s no Coit tower, and it has gross construction out front, but still… the trees are nice! This is what the weather has been like recently. Gray gray gray. I think we will have a gray Christmas…
December in California