Rum Balls Recipe - Christmas Cookie Special! Chocolate Rum Balls

Hello, this is Chef John from FoodWishes.com with Let's Get Ready to Rumble! Sorry, I really wanted to hire that guy to do that for me, but he wanted like a million dollars. But anyway, that's right, we're doing rumbles! A classic holiday cookie, even though they're more like a candy, but delicious any time of the year and incredibly easy to make. Okay, so there's a million versions of this, but this is my favorite, and it uses leftover brownies. That's right, I have three stale brownies. They can be old and dry, it doesn't matter. In fact, it's even better. And yes, yes, yes, of course I'm going to give you the recipe for the brownies. Although this works great with just regular cheap store-bought chocolate brownies. I'm going to crumble those up in a bowl, and I'm going to soak those with dark rum and a lot of it. By the way, this is not a cookie for rum inside. So you will catch a little buzz off these, which is, you know, all part of the show. So you're going to pour the rum over, you're going to mix it very well. It's going to take a minute to soak in, but it will. And if you keep stirring, you're going to have this lovely chocolate rum paste that looks something like that. Okay, so I'm going to line a plate with plastic. You can also use a silicone mat if you want. I'm going to use this little sorbet scoop to make these little like one-inch balls. You really can make these any shape or size you want. All right, but I prefer smaller. I'm going to scoop those out, and they're way too sticky to work with. So what we're going to do is we're going to cover those. We're going to pop them in the freezer for about 15-20 minutes until they're firm enough to roll. And how will you know they'll be firm enough to roll? That is your main clue. So I'm going to just roll in between my palms. It only takes a few seconds. By the way, this batch I'm showing you makes 20 small like one-inch rum balls. All right, once I've rolled them all, I'm going to throw those back in the freezer to firm up again while I make my chocolate coating. Not to be confused with chocolate codeine, which I believe is illegal. All right, for the chocolate coating, we're going to chop up a very good quality dark chocolate. I'm going to give you all that specific info on the blog. All right, once that's chopped up nice and small just like that, I'm going to throw most of it in a bowl. All right, but I'm going to reserve about 25% of it for later. You're going to see what happens. I'm going to put about an inch of water in a saucepan, bring that to a simmer, place my bowl over the hot water. All right, you don't want the bowl touching the water. All right, we're just using the steam here. My heat is on the lowest setting I have, and when that chocolate gets about halfway melted, I'm going to turn off the heat. I'm going to lift the bowl up to release a little bit of that steam, and there's going to be enough heat left in that water to melt the chocolate the rest of the way. All right, you want to be really careful not to get any water drips in this chocolate. It will ruin it. All right, it will seize up as they call it, and you'll have a mess. All right, as soon as that chocolate melts, and again remember the heat is off, I'm going to add in that 25% of chocolate I didn't add at the beginning. Stir that in. That's going to lower the temperature a little bit. It's going to make for a very, very easy to work with chocolate coating. Okay, so as soon as that second edition of chocolate has melted in, we are ready to basically start coating our rumballs. All right, so we're going to take those out of the freezer. We're going to toss it in. We're going to use a couple forks to kind of roll it around, make sure it's coated completely, and then we're going to carefully lift that out and place it on either a plastic lined pan or one of these silicone mats. Now here's how you don't want to do it. Have a bunch of extra chocolate on the fork and make a big mess. Okay, here's another one done correctly. Roll it around, cover it completely, lift it out of the chocolate, and let the chocolate drain a little bit. All right, get those last couple drops off there. Then when you push it off onto the silicone, it will just have a little bit underneath that makes a nice little base like that. All right, so that's a good one, that's a good one. So these, they have the little feet. Not so great, but don't worry. You can just cut those a little bit like that. When you lift them off, nobody will know the difference. Okay, so basically when the chocolate hardens, which is just going to take a few minutes, you're ready to serve. I'm going to throw those on a plate. I'm going to dust with a little cocoa powder just to make them look oh so cool. You can refrigerate those until needed, and there you go. What a gorgeous, gorgeous holiday cookie, special occasion confection. So have you ever been sitting around thinking, I can't decide whether I want to eat chocolate or do shots of rum? This combines the best of both in one delicious bite. All right, let me bite into one of these. Just incredible. All right, that firm crisp chocolate coating, that soft succulent, almost like a chocolate rum ganache inside, just a beautiful thing. So anyway, whether it's for a fancy holiday party or just any time of the year, I hope you give these a try. All the ingredient amounts are on foodwishes.com, as usual. And as always, enjoy!