Christmas favorites – sharing balls and a boomer’s memory of Christmas

Two reposts I’ve always enjoyed…

Bourbon balls — pure joy in an oblate spheroid… 

Have a Balle for the holidays! Dark chocolate, pecans, bourbon… mmm. This is a great idea as a holiday treat around the house, stocking stuffer, or pleasing little giftlet to friends, family, neighbors.

True, it’s three days before Christmas, but these are great for family or friends who drop by. Guaranteed smiles all around!

Every year I make about two hundred of these delectable, moderately addictive orbs of chocolate nirvana, Les Balles de Bourbon Supréme, and carefully mete them out to family members and far-flung friends whose lives, they tell me every year, wouldn’t be the same without them. Pete Schweddy, get off my double-entendre lawn, because these are serious balls to savor in your mouth as you would the finest chocolate truffle.

This is a no-bake recipe, and the ingredients are very simple, but it does take some time because you are, after all, making lots of little (about 1″) balls and stacking them neatly in plastic containers, so there is a bit of a “mind-numbing” factor built in. Listen to some music or watch television when you’re rolling them – it’s more fun than counting “83… 84…”

Les balles de bourbon supréme (bourbon balls)

Here we go: the main ingredients are good dark chocolate, crushed pecans, bourbon or sour mash whiskey, and cookie dust. From an original recipe I found, I cut back the sugar by about a third, and boosted the bourbon to amp up the fun quotient!

For about 90 1″ balls, you’ll need:
  • about 90 vanilla wafers (about 1 1/4 box), pummeled
  • 12 ozs. semi-sweet dark chocolate chips (dark is best)
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 4 1/2 tbsp. light corn syrup
  • 6 ozs. bourbon or whiskey (overproof is best! Go big!)
  • 1 1/2 cups pecans, crushed
  • powdered sugar to roll the balls in

Ruthlessly demolish the cookies and nuts…

This is not a recipe for pacifists! Grind, pummel, smoosh the vanilla wafers into dust – or very small crumbs. I put half of them in a gallon ziploc bag and roll and pound them with a rolling pin, then repeat for the remaining half. Do the same for the pecans – pound and grind them mercilessly in a ziploc bag until the nutmeat pieces are no larger than a caper. Combine the nuts and crumbs in a very large mixing bowl.

Now melt the chocolate in a double boiler, over (not in) hot water. When silky smooth, remove the pot from the hot water and stir in the sugar and the corn syrup till well-blended. Now slowly add the bourbon, stirring as you do, and blend it smooth – it takes awhile to get it fully infused. Pour the chocolate mixture into the crumbs and nuts and stir with a wooden spoon until well-mixed (yes, this is a real workout!). Now take a break and let the mixture cool down for a half hour or so – it’ll be much easier to make balls when it dries out a little.

Put about 2 cups of powdered sugar in a bowl or platter, and start rolling the balls in your well-washed hands, roll in the sugar, and put in a large plastic container. You can separate layers with tinfoil. When finished, seal up the container and put in the fridge for at least 3 days – they get better (like many of us) as they age!

Because there’s virtually nothing in them to go bad, they keep a good long while in the fridge, and can be frozen, too. And they’ll even keep at room temp for several days.

Used my macro filter for this… 

Variations? Um… okay.

When we lived in the south for some ten years, outside Atlanta, we appreciated the region’s special affinity for good sour mash whiskey or Kentucky bourbon, or the rare single-barrel sample you might be treated to, so I’m committed to the whiskey/bourbon part of the recipe – and the pecans as well, which grow all over south Georgia. But you can make these with (*sigh*) rum if you want, or brandy, or whatever your favorite spirits may be. You can also do them “virgin,” I suppose, but you’ll need to add some kind of liquid – maybe orange juice – to get the mix to the right consistency. Yep, orange juice would be fine, actually.

So have fun, and merry merry!

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The collective memory of a child’s Christmas

If you were born in the ’40s or ’50s, you remember how it was. Just about perfect, but with a few wrinkles. This is a boomer boy’s memory…

There was always lots of snow then, and you’d go out with your brother wearing your scratchy wool jacket and hole-y mittens and corduroy pants worn smooth, along with those leaking galoshes, and you’d build snow forts and an arsenal of snowballs all in your back yard which seemed to go on forever. It didn’t, of course, but you let it expand in your imagination and become enormous and always beckoning outward. You got cold and wet in the snow, your feet are sopping, and you caught a snowball in the face from your jerky brother, so it was time to go inside.

DSC_3218 copyOur house in Georgia, Christmas 2011. Our guest shack, far left.

The tree was up and decorated, and your father had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir playing on the Victrola in the living room while he’s pouring whiskey, and he starts to get emotional over “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” starting to tear up, except the record skips right there, always at “Hail, the Heav’n born Prince (SKIP) light and life to all he brings,” and he pulls himself together and goes back to making his drink. Drinks were everywhere, especially at the annual Christmas party where all their friends came with their furs and satiny dresses and bow ties and cigarettes and fragrant pipes, dozens and dozens of them smelling of stale tobacco and after shave, and all of them wanting to see you and your brothers and sisters, and tousle your hair or slap you on the back. Where are you at school? What grade are you in now? My heavens! See how you’ve grown! You wore an ill-fitting scratchy tweed jacket and a fat necktie you’d just learned to tie yourself, and it’s all too tight around your body as you struggle through the clouds of cigarette smoke and throngs of all these old people to get to the food table. And the beautiful Christmas music plays on.

holly

You’re up early the next morning because there are lots of glasses half-filled with Mom’s special eggnog still in them, and everywhere the wreckage of glasses of unfinished wine and booze (which you don’t have a taste for yet), but oh that eggnog! When your parents finally creak downstairs holding the handrail, you’re one happy little dude – and not too dumb, either, because you’ve swigged some orange juice to kill the smell on your breath.

Christmas then had a forever smell. The tree smelled wonderful back then – it was balsam and radiated its perfume to lock in your memory forever – and it dripped heavily with tinsel and heirloom family ornaments – and now it’s Christmas Eve day which your mother declares every year is her favorite day of the year, as if it’s news. You start to get quivery and tingly about that new Meta-Jet bicycle (made in Japan!! Cool!) or that snare drum or that new guitar or the HeathKit make-your-own-radio thing. Maybe it was simpler than that: a crystal radio set, a water rocket, or anything having to do with space because you’ve grown up watching Tom Corbett and his Space Cadets or Captain Midnight and have sent in how many cereal boxtops with a quarter taped to each one all addressed to Battle Creek, Michigan to get that toy rocket or ray gun, or maybe it was a Lone Ranger cap gun or Davy Crockett coonskin cap. Maybe you asked your parents for a Jerry Mahoney dummy or Richie Ashburn bat or Willie Mays glove. You know from their secret smiles something big is coming, something you really want.

holly

Family might come around Christmas Eve, kicking the snow from their boots at the door. Here’s your cigar-smoking uncle who’d crush you with a bear hug and scrape your face with his five o’clock beard, and your Aunt Peggy who always seems to be wearing an apron and looks and acts just like Jeff Miller’s mom on Lassie, the loving and caring and cookie-baking perfect Mom. The fire’s lit, the grownups sit and drink whiskey – it was Bellow’s Partners Choice back then, and they all seemed to be smoking L&Ms – and they chat idly about Sputnik or Ike’s heart attack or the incredibly exciting lineup of 1957 car models, all of them with rakish fins. Now Mom goes to check on the roast beef in the oven, one of those roasts that drips fat and goo into the pan that gets ladled up with the mashed potatoes and peas and the deeply rich and salty slices of beef. (This is the American meat-and-potatoes era. You don’t have pizza, spaghetti is from a Chef Boyardee can, seafood is frozen fishsticks). Now the Old Man sits at the piano and you’re dutifully standing up to gather round the piano and sing more carols even as your voice is changing and sputters between a croaky bass and strangled falsetto, and no, he won’t play “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

It’s late now, time to prepare a snack for Santa on the little bench in front of the fireplace. Cookies, milk, your older brother suggests pouring in a shot of whiskey, the Old Man scolds him, makes threats of hauling us all off to church for their Christmas Eve service. Santa, fading into myth, is still sacrosanct. You’re grateful that your father has kept his temper under control all night because you know all too well how it can be sometimes, with the whiskey.

holly

You kneel at your bedside for your litany of God Blesses, not forgetting the dog, redouble your prayer for that two-tube stereo amplifier from Radio Shack, and roll into the long blur of sleep, waking up in the dark, it’s too early, just five a.m. Now six a.m.

There’s always an orange in the toe of the stocking to stretch it out and make it seem longer, heavier… and there are always lacy patterns of frost on the windows and snow outside and your breath blows out in clouds. Sometimes it seems to be mostly clothes under the tree, the stuff you need but don’t want, sometimes large heavy boxes spreading out from the tree and crowding the furniture. The new 3-speed bike is in the garage with a ribbon on it. The guitar is a kid’s toy guitar and it angers you. You give the Old Man a Sinatra album and he seems indifferent. Mom is ecstatic over your handmade potholders. The day slides leisurely through the morning toward Christmas dinner at noon with the oyster stew and the turkey and Bloody Marys and always the stale smoke, all of it sliding into memory, building into a collective memory – a monument, actually – of all Christmases past and present and future with the always smells and the always feelings held just beneath the skin, fragile and poignant and never simple.

Every year it will be like that.

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Ned White

About Ned White

Ned White is a writer, novelist, crossword puzzle constructor, traveler through 49 states, and at times a danger in the kitchen. He lives with his wife in South Thomaston.