Bourbon Pecan Butter Balls

Wait!  Is this actually a recipe from The Baking Bible?  And yet there's no baking involved?  (Unless you make another batch of Chocolate Oriolos, of course).  I actually have some chocolate Oriolos in the bottom of my freezer, but, due to a long story that I won't bother you with, I can no longer get to the bottom of my freezer because a person put six months' worth of frozen items on top of the Oriolos and sundry other things until this person locates housing.

Rather than make new cookies from scratch (or, worse, remove the ton or so of food from the top of the freezer). I simply bought some Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers.  (While I was looking at the cookie section in the grocery aisle, I was stunned at how bad most boxed cookies look.  I have come to believe, like many of you, that sugar is probably the food villain that we thought fat was, and I've vowed to eat less sugar.  But I'm not ready to give it up entirely.

When I started baking with a scale, I was obsessive about getting the weight just right.  Now one of my scales weighs to the tenth of a gram, and yet I'm more careless.  But by breaking the last wafer into tiny pieces, I managed to get 383 grams, right on the nose.  I took that as a good omen.

Should I talk about making the cookies?  There's really not much to say because it simply involves a food processor and the ingredients in the picture of the mise en place--chocolate cookies, pecans, cocoa, butter, powdered sugar, corn syrup, and bourbon.  I don't usually use alcohol when I might be giving food to my grandchildren, but I thought that bourbon balls should be made with bourbon.  JJ took one look at the bottle of Maker's Mark, and said, "These aren't for children, are they?"

Here's the processed mixture of everything but the pulverized cookies and the bourbon.

Here's the mixture with everything.  I found this to be a little dry, but, rather than adding more bourbon or water, I just dampened my hands every few times I reached in to shape a ball, and that worked well.

The triple sugar roll (sounds a little like an Olympic event) was the most fun part about making these cookies.  A little more sparkly white sugar clung to the chocolate-pecan balls with every coating.  Yes, sugar is evil incarnate but this is why I can't quite give it up.

The thing is, these were really good cookies.  I can hardly believe that eating a few of these dainty little morsels is going to take years off of your life.  They're intensely chocolatey, crunchy, and nutty, and the bourbon gives them a wonderful mellow taste.  (I waited the recommended 24 hours before tasting them, and they didn't have a raw, boozy flavor, although they did taste like booze.)  I liked them a lot.  So did Jim, and so did the people at the office.