mutteringhousewife

I feel like there’s a pirate joke in there somewhere, but I’ll let it go.  I’ve learned my lesson and am doing a test run of Bounty Balls before unleashing them on the general public.  I may also need to come up with a better name.

I really love it when people give me raw ingredients.  A friend of mine recently accidentally bought two and half kilos of shaved coconut rather than the five hundred grams she’d intended.  It could happen to anyone.  She was correct in assuming I’d be delighted to take some off her hands.  Earlier this week I was trying to convert some of it into desiccated coconut in my coffee grinder, now that the hand held blender has gone into the cleanup after it refused to be a substitute for a Thermomix. The result was useable on top of a raspberry slice, but it was more of a coconut meal than little shreds.  It also smelled gorgeous and I was keen to use it something else.  Combined with my recent chocolate mint experience, the obvious choice was to have a crack at the Bounty Bar.

How people found new recipes without an entire library of cookbooks or access to Google is beyond me.  Tons of trial and error, I’ll bet.  I was surprised not to find lots of Bounty recipes, I guess people are pretty happy with the commercially available version.  The one I decided on was on taste.com.au, but came with a warning that it hadn’t been tested and there weren’t any reviews.  It was also half in metric and half in ozzes.  It looked like it might possibly work though, so this morning I gave it a go.

Mix together 100 grams of desiccated coconut with 200 grams of condensed milk.  If you’re processing the coconut in a twenty year old coffee grinder, be aware it will only take 20 grams at a time.  It will smell very good, though.  It’s also not the best idea to wipe out the crumbs with your finger without turning it off at the wall, but I like to live dangerously.  Start mixing in 200 grams of icing sugar.  That will be quite wet, so you work more and more in until you have a fairly stiff dough.  It actually behaves like a flour dough, I think it probably took about 300 grams for this batch.  You can knead it and everything.  Interesting.

Pinch bits off to roll into little balls, put them on a tray lined with baking paper and whack them in the freezer for ten minutes.  Meanwhile melt 300 grams of good quality dark chocolate over a double boiler.  I used metal tongs to dip the coconut balls, more lenticular than spherical, really,  into the chocolate, then placed them on a tray lined with baking paper.  Not as fiddly as it sounds.

I have them in the fridge now, but the Horror snaffled one on the way.  He snarfed it down, choked quite a lot, had two glasses of water, then asked for another.  He’s not getting one, but be warned, you can’t just breathe them in, they should be savoured.  I hope they set nicely.  Might be safest to keep them in the fridge.  Hidden behind the pickles, so the Horror can’t find them.