Pop5 - The 5 Most Popular Recipes Right Now..
11 May 2011
Share this post
Today, the 11th of May, is the unofficial 'Chocolate Ball Day' in Sweden (well, technically its the unofficial "negerboll" day, which basically means "negro ball". However, the name 'negerboll' has, for obvious reasons, fallen out of fashion, though it is still in fairly common use as a lot of 'traditionalist' Swedes argue that it is not intended as a racial referenence, rather a descriptive term reflecting the dark colour of the ball, with neger being a derivative of the latin word for the colour black). As such, I thought I'd devise a bacon version, replacing the the traditional desiccated coconut coating with crunchy bacon!
The result? Well, I have to admit that the first bite was a bit odd. I think that's partially down to my having eaten hundreds of chocolate balls (they were my favourite treat as a kid, partly because they're delicious and partly because you can whip a batch up in about 5 minutes), though. The second ball was much tastier - though I think I should have used slightly stronger coffee, and replaced the caster sugar with light brown. Ah well, there's always next year!
If you want to try and make these yourself,
You will need
(Makes about 8)
- 50g of Unsalted Butter, at room temperature
- 150ml (yep.. Swedish recipes use liquid measures for pretty much everything) Porridge Oats
- 50ml of Sugar - You'd normally use Caster, and I did, but I reckon Light Brown sugar would work better when coating with bacon
- 1tsp Vanilla Essence
- about 50ml Desiccated Coconut
- 3tbsp cold, strong Coffee
- 1.5 tbsp Cocoa
- 5 rashers of Proper Crispy Bacon
Method
It almost feels pointless to even do a method section for these, you basically can't fail no matter how you go bout assembling them! Anywho..
1) Prepare the proper crispy bacon (click the link in the 'you will need' section for a guide to getting your bacon proper crispy), chop reasonably finely and put to one side.
2) Measure out all of the other ingredients and place them in a big bowl.
3) Combine the ingredients using your hands, then divide the mixture in to 8 or so and roll into balls.
4) Roll the balls in the chopped crispy bacon.If it doesn't stick, put the balls back in your mixing bowl, add a tiny bit more coffee, and return to step 3.
5) Serve.
Comments
and you have interesting post and thanks for sharing
--Kathy
Thanks! Good shout on the bacon - that is the point of this blog, after all! If you happen to swing by after you've made them, I'd love to hear what you thought. :) By the way, you can also substitute the coconut for 'pearl sugar' (also known as nib sugar), and if you've got some old cookies or a cake that's on its last legs, you can blitz it to crumbs in a food processor (or use your fingers, of course) and substitute the crumbs in for some of the oats. Delicious. :)
RSS feed for comments to this post