Monday, December 9, 2013

Christmas Mint Oreo Balls

Christmas prep!  Does it get much busier than Christmas prep?

Yes.  Yes, it does.  If you are a mother of young children doing Christmas prep, then you have it way busier than G&I preparing for Christmas.  But even if you're not a mother of young children, chances are good that you are busy with shopping and decorating and wrapping and specialty cooking.

G&I spent Saturday doing some shopping and candy making and J-man watching and Christmas carding.  And then we spent Sunday going to church and shopping and baking and candy making and Christmas carding - and J-man watching if watching this video from Saturday night counts as J-man watching...J-man playing kickback
We spent time working on homemade Christmas goodies for friends that will go with the Peppermint Meringues I talked about last Monday in the boxes for those on the nice list.  Santa and I have been chatting to make sure I give these to the right people, ya understand.

This is what we made on Saturday, and they are super easy, but pretty yummy if you like Cool Mint Oreos.
 
This is a published recipe by Kraft and I only made one change.  I did a double recipe to be sure we have enough for sharing.  Here is what we used, i.e., the double recipe.  I even remembered to capture the ingredients! 
 
This is two 15oz pkgs. of Cool Mint Oreos and 12oz. of cream cheese.  Put the Oreos in a food processor and do your best not to eat one cause they smell wonderful as soon as you peal back the seal!
This is actually the 2nd package.  I learned on the first package that you really do need to turn these into crumbs before you add the cream cheese.  Otherwise you end up having to stop and start the food processor multiple times to scrape and break up the cream cheese.
Count on one stubborn Oreo in the package that refuses to crumble.  You just have to let it know who's boss!
Once you've established your superiority over Oreos, then add the cream cheese and mix again until it looks like this...
 
Now you're ready to shape the balls.  We went a bit on the smaller side, because we like them that way, but you can shape them to whatever size you like.  Therefore the recipe yield can be anywhere from 1 to the 40 Kraft suggests for a single recipe to the 80 Kraft suggests for a double recipe to the 100+/- that we ended up with.  We included a spoon and G's finger as reference points to give you an idea of the size we used.
 
Then give these guys a little rest in the freezer.  This really is a key step.  It will make dipping so much easier.
 
When we were ready to dip, we melted some white almond bark in the microwave, and I really do like the melt/soften button on this microwave!  It took a little less than one full package of almond bark to cover this double recipe.  Since I have gel paste food colors on hand and not the liquid kind, I added a couple of toothpicks worth of green color to the melted bark - or until it looks sorta "minty".


We didn't use chocolate sprinkles.  We used some red, green and white sprinkles instead.  And then G inspected them for any little holes in the "minty" chocolate coating. 
 
Since the balls are very cold, the coating will set up fairly quickly, which is way nice since the final step is to pack them up in plastic containers with waxed paper between the layers and tuck them away in the freezer until it's time to join the other treats in the Christmas boxes!
 
Yes, you're right.  This is way too easy to bother posting all of these pics, but I want to learn how to do this, and that will only happen by practicing it.  Tomorrow I will post about the treats we worked on Sunday...and my bet is that after that, you'll be able to guess the theme for this year's Christmas boxes.  It will be tricky and hard, but I bet you'll be able to do it!
 
Seeya then!
 
 

1 comment:

  1. Ahhhh... my problem was my oreos weren't mashed enough! Still tasted good but really UGLY! And these are beautiful with the minty green chocolate!

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