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These chocolate pinecones are each meant to be a delicious one or two-bite treat. They are chocolate rum balls, decorated with a staggered-spiral of almond slices meant to look like the open scales of a pinecone, especially once the whole thing is drizzled with a chocolate glaze. Before serving, they may be sprinkled with a dusting of powdered sugar to simulate snow, and make them look even more adorable.
We use coconut oil to make our glaze, which produces something similar to Magic Shell, and melts on contact with skin. It produces a lovely mouth-feel. In order to produce a glaze which is less prone to melt on contact with skin, paraffin wax may be used in place of coconut oil. Food-grade paraffin is, or was, generally available in the canning and preserving section of grocery stores. I have never tried to make glaze with beeswax; I don’t think it would achieve the same gloss. Let us know if you have experience with using beeswax that way.
Once the rum balls are rolled, they should be allowed a half-hour or so to set up a little, to make them easier to handle while sticking in the toasted sliced almonds. After they are glazed, they will once again need to chill (or at least sit at room temperature) while their glaze hardens. Depending on the room, a coconut oil-based glaze may never harden at room temperature.
Makes enough for 16 pinecones.
Equipment:
large mixing bowl
pie tin or similar for toasting sliced almond
tray for finished pinecones, optionally with rack
double-boiler (metal mixing bowl atop a pot) for chocolate glaze
Ingredients:
1/2 box chocolate cake half a recipe’s worth of chocolate cake from a box
1/4 cup rum
2 Tbsp condensed milk
1 pinch salt optionally: use flaky salt and attempt to leave it whole
1/4 lb sliced almonds toasted to perfection
1/4 lb Baker’s chocolate semi-sweet or less; bittersweet works quite well
2 Tbsp Coconut oil or 1oz paraffin
Procedure:
1. Spread the sliced almonds into a pan and set them in an oven or on a stove to toast. Keep a close eye on them so they don’t burn, but get deliciously toasty. Then let them cool.
2. Meanwhile, place the cake chunks into a large mixing bowl and stab them with a fork until they come apart into “crumbs”. The texture need not be fine.
3. Pour over the rum and the condensed milk and stir everything together with the fork. It will decrease in volume as the cake crumbs soak up the liquid and start to compress.
4. Once everything is well, mixed, form generous tablespoons of the mixture into balls, about 1” in diameter, and make them somewhat egg (or pinecone) shaped.
5. Once all the balls are formed, let them chill about half an hour.
6. In the interim, the chocolate glaze may be prepared. Do not do this too far in advance lest the chocolate dry out in the double boiler.
7. To get the chocolate glaze ready, heat the coconut oil or paraffin in the double boiler until it has melted.
8. Meanwhile, chop the chocolate.
9. Add the chopped chocolate pieces to the melted oil or wax, and allow it to melt.
10. Stir everything together thoroughly.
11. When the rum balls are sufficiently chilled, take them out and insert toasted sliced almonds into them in a staggered-spiral pattern, like the pattern of scales on a pinecone.
12. Once all the balls have their almonds, drizzle them with chocolate glaze. To get really fancy, they might be speared onto a skewer from below and wholly dipped in glaze, if you made enough glaze to submerge them (which this is not - probably four times as much at minimum would be required).
13. Allow glazed pinecones to chill, optionally on a rack to allow excess glaze to run off (and be re-melted for future use).
14. For service, optionally arrange the pinecones on a bed of shredded coconut, or perhaps just a dusting of powdered sugar, with a bit more powdered sugar dusted on top to suggest snow, and add visual interest.
15. Leftovers, if there are any, will be good for a day or two before storage in the fridge causes the almonds to soften. Don’t plan to keep any one batch around for a long time.
Music: www.bensound.co...
20 дек 2023
