Get Crackin'

Are you baking yet? Is your house a frenzy of powdered sugar, royal icing, and baking sheets cooling on every available surface (which, if you are me, might include your bed)?

Or perhaps you’ve made a few cookies, the holiday tunes are playing and you’re thinking about gifts, but you have plenty of time right? And then all of a sudden you realize that Christmas is around the corner and you had better stop antagonizing about what to buy your cousin who never likes anything and just buy something so you can get it in the mail so that it is delivered in time for her to open it Christmas morning and sort of sigh about it and tell you she could find the same thing (so much cheaper) at Wal-Mart.

Maybe it takes a good holiday concert to get you into gear (the kind with Lou Reed singing White Christmas). Your holiday preparations need a little kick-in-the-pants. And there’s no kick-in-the-pants like a bit of bourbon, hmm?

A little while back, I promised some family classics, and these bourbon balls are it. This is one of those recipes where people ask you, year after year, “you’re bringing those bourbon balls, right?” Yes, mom, I’ll make the bourbon balls, which everyone sneaks from the tin throughout the long lazy holiday afternoons on the farm. After all, it wouldn’t be a Tennessee Christmas without a little bit of Jack Daniels. Help yourself to a little snifter while you’re at it, I’m sure Lou Reed would do the same.


Bourbon Balls
This recipe is very flexible, you can use whatever sort of cake or cookie crumbs you have on hand, or substitute walnuts for the pecans, or rum for bourbon, as you like.

1 1/2 cups finely crushed graham crackers (or vanilla wafers or cake crumbs)
1/2 cup finely chopped pecans
1 cup confectioner’s sugar, plus more for rolling
2 tbl cocoa
2-3 tbl bourbon
3 tbl corn syrup

Combine the crumbs, pecans, sugar, and cocoa in a large bowl. In a small bowl combine the corn syrup and bourbon, then add that mixture to the crumbs. Stir the mixture with your hands or a spoon to coat all the crumbs, so that the mixture sticks together. Refrigerate the mixture for half an hour. Shape the mixture into balls, then roll the balls in confectioners sugar. Store in a tin in a cool place or in the refrigerator.