So, once again, I hosted my favorite holiday/birthday extravaganza a week before Christmas. And, once again, I whipped up a big bowl of Hot Buttered Rum batter. And, for the first time, I wound up with leftovers – A lot of left overs!
So what do you do with a large container of creamed butter with brown and powdered sugars? Sounds like all-but-cookies to me! And thats what they became.
This is the art of baking, where a little science applies but if you get too stuck on portions you’ll never get passed, well, creamed butter.
I estimated (eyeballed) and decided to aim toward a standard sugar or chocolate chip cookie. I added a couple eggs, a splash of vanilla, roughly two teaspoons of baking powder, a generous pinch of salt and the remaining heavy whipping cream I also had in the fridge. Into my handy-dandy Kitchen Aid mixer, and away we dough… (see what I did there?!)
- When that all looked right, I added flour until the consistency looked right, too – sticky and thick. Enough to hold together. But I got it a little too dense and this is where things turned exciting: Rum balls need rum, right? So, to wet the dough a bit for better consistency, I splashed in a little spiced rum and mixed it just a bit more. Perfect!
These being test cookies, I decided to trial a couple of shapes. I hand-rolled two and rough scooped a third. I used a fork to depress one of the rolled ones and added a pinch of salt – like a peanut butter cookie. After 8 mins,they weren’t quite done but by 10 mins they were perfect. My neice was helping, and we decided to go with rolled but not forked. So another pan in and away we went. They were good – crispy outside, chewy inside, and they expanded into round discs, like you might expect from a sugar or chocolate chip cookie.
After rolling two sheets of 10 or so cookies each, I forgot the second pan in the oven and discovered a crispy golden cookie, quite a lot like a snap! Yum – a little crumbly and hard on it’s own, they’ve been great with coffee all week.
Even after those two sheets, I ended up with enough dough to form two good-sized logs of dough for later, which I double wrapped and stuck in the freezer.
So that’s my Make-Good story of the week – what clever things have you done with leftovers this week?