My afternoon turned into culinary experimentation yesterday. With a *free* day of no work and no pre-scheduled errands, I had a large window to create a few tasty tidbits for upcoming events. I started with pre-cut cookies in a box to bring to a dinner and charades party at a friend's house. That turned into needing ice cream to make ice cream cookie sandwiches. Once I ate some lunch and finished those two projects, I moved onto rum balls for our soccer-watching get together this weekend. When all was said and done, I was tired.
ICE CREAMWhen my sister gav
e me the ice cream maker for my birthday/Christmas gift, she also gave me the Ben & Jerry's recipe book. I made Jerry's Chocolate to pair with the cookies. Aside from lots of dairy (not so friendly for me), it involves melting chocolate over a (make shift) double boiler before titrating in the remaining ingredients. It's a little time consuming, but melting chocolate slowly can be quite the enjoyable contemplative activity. Once the ingredients are put together, it has to cool in the fridge, leaving a bit of time to: a) bake the cookies and b) eat some lunch. Once it's cool, it's time to throw it in the ice cream maker.
CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIESDad brought me th
e cookies in a box to try a while back. French Meadow's idea behind the box was that you can make them one by one and have a hot cookie whenever you want one. It's genius. I decided to make the whole box since I was planning on feeding more than one person. They would have been perfect. When I took them out, they needed like 2 more minutes. And then I forgot about them for about 5. Oh well. The bottoms are a bit dark, but the rest of their GF, CF, SF cookiness is great- crumbly, not too sugary.
RUM BALLSOur theme for World Cup soccer watching (US VS England) is balls. Yes, balls. Meatballs, cheese balls, popcorn balls, and rum balls will all be included. I can count the times I have eaten rum balls on about two fingers. I really didn't know what I was getting into. I used Martha Stewart's recipe. It involved making a brownie (I subbed regular flour for GF flour), then letting it cool. The cooled brownie is crumbed into a mixing bowl and rum is added. What
should happen, per the recipe, is a giant ball should form. No clumping happened for me. Clumpage is essential for forming the balls. I added Karo syrup and a little more rum until the crumbs clumped. Whallah! Balls. We'll see how good they are when they get served cold on Saturday.
