Post #399156 by MinnesotaChef on Tue, Aug 5, 2008 6:08 PM

When I worked in the hotels, we would save any and all day old cakes and muffins in a big plastic bin (Lexan) in the freezer almost year round. Every week or so the pastry chef would "Hooch 'em" with all the little left over swallows of rum, brandy, and whatever else we had collected in a gallon jug from the banquet department. After a while the crumbs wouldn't freeze any more and maintained an odd squishy consistency. When the holidays rolled around he would make a big batch of syrup, nuts and chocolate and then dump in the accumulated crumbs and scraps. this was done in a 50 Quart mixer with a paddle attachment. We used lunch lady scoops to shape them and let them sit overnight in the cooler. This often produced over 1,000 quarter sized balls. The next day we rolled them in sugar and served them at the employee holiday party.

This same process could be scaled down at done at home.

I know the idea of randomly mixing whatever liquor is on hand sounds like it wouldn't work, but we never, ever had any of these left over. In fact these were usually the first thing to be run out.