This recipe name sounds like a weird way to avoid swearing. “Sweet tater balls, Nellie, them durn cows done broke through the fence again!”
Oh, but it gets weirder. Wait until you see what they looked like frying.
- 1 can sweet potatoes, mashed
- 1 stick butter, melted
- 2 egg yolks
- 1 cup coconut
- 1 cup pecans, chopped
- 1/2 box Post Toasties
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- Mix all ingredients together and form into balls, then roll in Post Toasties. Leave hole in top, put a small marshmallow in and cover. Drop in bacon grease and fry slowly until brown. Decorate with coconut and cherry in center. Delicious!
The lack of measurements (1 can? 1/2 box?)… well, we’ll just conclude this makes things more exciting.
And the small box of Post Toasties — wow, did you know Post Toasties were originally called Elijah’s Manna? It was changed in 1908. I find the idea of Elijah getting a delivery of cornflakes in the dessert pretty amusing for some reason.
Oh, whoops, I’m getting distracted. Cereal boxes used to be 8 ounces, so we used 4 in the sweet potato mix (and nearly as much trying to coat the outside after stuffing marshmallows into them).
While frying, it started to get oddly foamy. Incredibly foamy. Like, bubble bath foamy.
I tried making a few into flat cakes, which doesn’t work; they all fell apart much more easily, and it foamed even more.
And a lot of the cornflakes just fell off and got burnt and weird. This is what’s left in the pan after frying only eight balls.
Sweet tater balls, that there is some nasty fried Elijah’s Manna!
Eventually, we ended up with a reasonable number of not-burnt balls, and I threw them onto a plate and in front of Buzz. “Steak and potatoes. Well, sweet potatoes. Enjoy.”
“Oh, these look interesting.”
“Pretty good. Tastes like sweet potato casserole… except greasier.”
Verdict: Good, if greasy.
From the tasting notes:
Interesting way to serve a sweet potato casserole. The burntness was not a significant problem (most of the really burnt bits fell off during frying). It was a lot of work and fuss to make a greasy, crunchy topping.
Now you’ve made me want to try slipping “Sweet tater balls, that there is some nasty fried Elijah’s Manna!” into casual conversation. That has to be one of the best sentences ever!
Oh geez, I laughed and laughed at the frying photos – they just got funnier and funnier, from foaming to complete decimation. (The last photo looked kind of like some of my cooking, however…)
I don’t normally include a vast amount of detail of the cooking process, but that amount of foam just had to be shared with the world.
I was clearly writing this blog post in that just-after-cooking haze, where I can’t quite believe what came out of my kitchen and I’m a little punchy as a result…
Oh, I just love this recipe. Just seeing the picture I knew they had corn flakes in them. But the very best part was frying them in bacon grease. I think you needed a deeper pan in which to fry them. I’ve had that problem when frying certain things in a shallow pan. You get a gold star for attempting this recipe.
I should expand my kitchen cookware collection — we do a surprising amount of frying, exclusively for retro recipes 😀 and a deeper, wider pan would be useful to have.
“Sweet tater balls!” is going into my colorful expressions collection! 🙂
As for the recipe, I wonder if they might hold together better in a deep fryer?
I think it’s more likely that they would have disintegrated entirely in a fryer.