(Maybe not) Greek chocolate balls

Growing up, my mother and I spent the weeks leading up to Christmas in sacred and joyful anticipation. At Sunday dinner we marked the passage of the month with the candles in our Advent wreath. The Christmas tree (always artificial due to my grandmother’s allergies) and decorations were exhumed from the depths of the attic where they had languished all year and mom worked her magic to transform the house from to red and green and silvery tinsel, shimmering in the ever longer and darker nights. I was given the job of setting up her mother’s Nativity crèche next to the tree in the living room, carefully unwrapping and arranging the precious figurines fragile and flaking with age. We listened to recordings of a children’s chorus singing carols and prepared to sing the same carols ourselves at candlelight Christmas Eve service. After church, we returned home to open our stockings in front of the fireplace, at which time my mother would present a platter veritably towering with an homemade Christmas cookies.

The cookies themselves were my mother’s most sacred Christmas ritual. Every year, she made what I only realized as an adult was a truly astounding number to give as gifts to family, friends, and the special people who she recognized played a large and too often thankless role in our lives – the bus drivers, my teachers, the staff at our doctor’s office. She planned her cookies with surgical precision, baking her first freezer-safe batch on Halloween (!), and steadily working over the next two months to fill the deep freeze and multiple 2-gallon mason jars with enough cookies to fill dozens and dozens of cookie plates, which she assembled and delivered throughout the season – of course keeping plenty on hand to serve to anyone dropping by to visit and for our own family celebration on the big day.

I have to admit that a large part of my motivation in starting this blog was to try to recapture and share my mother’s Christmas cookie magic. In the past several years I’ve tried to carry on the tradition in my own way. I don’t start until after Thanksgiving, and I don’t have a deep freeze or any 5-gallon jars, but I try to make at least 5 or 6 different treats and and share them with the people I love. I switch the varieties up from year to year as I come across new recipes and occasionally fall victim to food trends (looking at you, white chocolate cranberry everything), but a few of my mother’s will remain forever in rotation.

One of these are an oddity that I have yet to encounter anywhere else. A Google search for “Greek chocolate balls” returns wildly diverging recipes. Walnuts seem to be a common thread, but beyond that its a free-for-all; some versions use cocoa powder and others melted chocolate, some are cooked with butter and condensed milk then rolled in nuts truffle-style, quite a few call for a healthy slog of rum. I can’t even put my finger on what or why these would be deemed “Greek” – other than a vague allusion to baklava via the rosewater and cinnamon – which would render them “Lebanese”, “Turkish”, or “Armenian” just as easily.

My mother’s recipe on first read doesn’t exactly inspire holiday baking feels. You start with bland, hard, Zwiebeck biscuits (originally created for teething babies), blitz to a powder in the food processor along with a pound of walnuts. Add finely chopped sweet baking chocolate (the green box), powdered sugar, the aforementioned cinnamon and rose water, then form into balls and roll in more powdered sugar. No cookie baking aroma. No rum. Not even any red and green sprinkles to remind you what you’re doing. But the taste of these little chocolate balls is immediately Christmas to me. The contrast of the warm cinnamon and floral, subtle rose is enticing, and the walnuts and biscuits lighten the texture from chocolate overload to a decidedly moreish consistency.

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If you’ve had these before, in this or any other iteration, please let me know in the comments!

**Note that I can literally never find the original Zwieback biscuits the original recipe calls for – you can substitute any dry, plain hard biscuit, as long as it is not savory or strongly flavored. I’ve used Melba toasts, plain biscotti, and “tea biscuits” with success. Another bonus – these can be made completely vegan depending on your choice of biscuit.