Eggnog & Brandy Balls

Holiday Brandy-stravagansa

I don't know about you, but for me holidays can be stressful times. Traveling to be with your loved ones, being with your loved ones, having to talk to your loved ones — all of these things are leading stressors that, when combined with the general blahs of a season without the sun, can really depress people.

Nothing cures depression like a depressant! If we have to spend our time in unpleasant familial obligations, we might as well get smashed.

Eggnog? More like Yay-gnog!

Because what are the holdiays if not an excuse to drink?

Okay, I'm playing up the booze angle here a bit but let me be frank: I effing love eggnog. No lie. Every year the delicious reappearance of eggnog has always been the high point of the holiday season. I even love the non-alcoholic kind you can buy in stores. For years this was my favorite seasonal drink.

Homemade eggnog blows that processed stuff out of the water.

Putting the Egg in Eggnog

We used four eggs in our nog, beating 1/3 cup of sugar into the yolks and putting the whites aside. The base was two cups of whole milk and a cup of half-and-half (though you can use anything up to heavy cream) seasoned with a teaspoon of nutmeg. Some people don't bother cooking their eggnog, but it's a general good practice whenever you're doing anything with eggs — Rocky Balboa notwithstanding.

We brought the milk mixture to a quick boil and combined it with the yolk-sugar. The trick is to to pour the hot milk into the yolks (not the other way around!) slowly enough to avoid accidentally cooking the yolks — something that would be pretty unpleasant. After you've combined the milk and eggs you'll want to slowly raise the temperature back to 160 F.

We used half a cup of brandy, but you could easily substitute rum. Not adding booze is an affront to Saint Nick. Set the whole thing into the fridge to just chill for a bit — a few hours will do the trick.

While the milk/yolk/booze is chilling you're going to want to whip the egg whites with an electric beater until they form soft peaks. Gradually add another tablespoon of sugar and keep beating until stiff peaks have formed. Once the milk/yolk/booze is cold, whisk the meringue into the milk mixture.

Chill With the Eggnog Already

Don't make the same mistake we did. After the whisking your eggnog will still be separated. If you drink it now, you'll have this weird head on top of watery nog that is still okay, but not great. We let the rest of it sit overnight, and discovered that it settled into an amazing drink if you just leave it alone for awhile. It was fresh, creamy, thick, and best of all, delicious.

Wrap Your Lips Around These Brandy Balls

Fun Fact: You can raise your blood alcohol level without drinking. Many recipes call for various amounts of potent alcohol, and not all of them burn off the "get you drunk" bits when cooking. For good reason, many of these sorts of recipes are used and consumed during the holidays.

Chocolate brandy balls are really good, and really strong.

Kill the Wabbit

This is another recipe that you can substitute rum for the brandy — if you're a complete philistine. The chocolate part of our brandy balls comes from crushed chocolate wafers. You're free to use vanilla wafers instead — if you're a total racist. We couldn't find the exact sort we wanted at the store, so we actually used some chocolate graham-cracker rabbit things, and it worked out just fine.

Anyway, you need chocolate crumbs, so we basically threw two-and-a-half cups of the rabbits into a ziplock bag and I wailed on them with the bottom of the measuring cup until they were all smashed up good. I'm good at the smashing.

Gently Roll Them In Your Hands

We also nuked a cup of chocolate chips until they were melted as a base, and into that we mixed the rabbit crumbs, 3 tablespoons of maple syrup, 1/2 cup of sugar, a cup of chopped nuts, and 1/2 cup of brandy. After chilling this stuff for about an hour, we hand rolled teaspoon-sized portions of this mixture into balls, then rolled the balls through a bowl of sugar to coat them.

Chill With the Balls Already

Now, maybe you have more patience than I do. Maybe you're a goddamn perfectionist saint. Maybe you can resist the allure of these delicious and potent chocolate morsels — if you can, you're a better man than I. Ideally you want to put the balls in an airtight container and chill them for from a few days to a few weeks to let them age — apparently, they only get better and better. I can't say, because Kat and I ate them all the next day, and they were pretty damn good.

Filled Beignets

New Orleans's Café du Monde is famous throughout the world for its beignets, a French pastry made from fried bread. The official state doughnut of Louisiana, beignets can be made with a variety of fillings, from the sweet to the savory. We've been using the bread bible recipe based on Café du Monde's to make breakfast beignets with tremendous success.

Preparation

We make our beignets out of challah bread dough, an egg- and butter-enriched bread whose production we will examine in a future blog entry. You can theoretically make them out of almost any sort of airy dough, but we find that the challah offers a certain decadent richness perfect for a great breakfast. For our fillings we decided to experiment with peanut butter, blackberry preserves, chocolate, and goat cheese. Our four beignets were made with various combinations of these ingredients — two cheese, peanut butter, and chocolate pastries, and two blackberry and cheese beignets.

We prepped the pastries by laying out the dough with the chosen fillings atop them while we put the vegetable oil on the stove to heat up. The oil needs to reach a temperature of 360 to 370 degrees, which we measure with a candy thermometer, so we have plenty of time to get ourselves ready. While the recipe calls for two to be fried at once, we found that with how much each beignet puffs up while being cooked it was easier to just cook them individually, and it didn't take too much longer. Once the fillings were laid out on the dough, we folded the dough over and sealed the edges — wet the edges with a little water to get a good seal, if necessary.

The dough fries up pretty quickly when dropped into the oil, even accounting for the need to flip the pastry over to make sure each side cooks evenly. The recipe as written calls for two minutes per side, but we used significantly less oil and so they heated up much more quickly — we found that if we left them to fry for more than half-a-minute per side, they would start to burn. After each beignet was cooked we set it aside on a paper towel-covered plate to await its kin.

After all four were cooked (a process that took less than ten minutes including the time to let the oil reheat to 360 following each beignet) we sprinkled them with powdered sugar and gave them a short break to cool. As you can see they came out both larger and darker than we had expected, but this wasn't necessarily a bad thing.


The Outcome

The beignets came through the frying process crisp on the outside and airy on the inside. The fried bread was rich and chewy, the fillings were warm but not too hot to eat, and the individual flavors were preserved. In my estimation the blackberry preserves and goat cheese ones were slightly more successful; the chocolate and peanut butter cheese beignets were missing a certain necessary 'something' to make them perfect. All in all a successful culinary experiment that has become a regular part of our breakfast repertoire.