Chocolate Dipped Bon-Bons

This is my favorite of all the Christmas candy recipes! I can remember as a kid, every time I would be in the kitchen, I would have to snitch one of these out of the fridge! My mom would always say "Who has been in the Bon-Bons?!? There won't be any left for Christmas!" I'm still pretty bad about snitching one every time I get in the fridge but who can blame me when you have sweetened condensed milk, coconut, pecans and powdered sugar all rolled up and dipped in semi-sweet chocolate! YUM!! They are kind of like a Mounds candy bar with pecans added in.

This recipe makes a LOT so you might want to consider cutting it in half. That is what I do now and I use the other half of the can of sweetened condensed milk to make half a recipe of Magic Cookie Bars. My mom's original recipe also calls for paraffin wax to be melted with the dipping chocolate to give it a hard, shiny shell. I still use paraffin but if you don't want to, you can use some solid vegetable shortening instead.

Bon-Bons

1 can sweetened condensed milk (Eagle Brand not evaporated milk)
7 1/2 ounces shredded coconut
3 cups finely chopped pecans
2 sticks butter, softened
2 pounds powdered sugar
24 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 stick paraffin wax, grated or finely chopped

Mix first five ingredients together well. Refrigerate for a couple of hours to make the dough easy to handle. Roll dough into 1-inch balls. At this point, I usually put them back in the fridge for an hour to make them easier to dip.

Melt chocolate chips and paraffin together in a double boiler or in the microwave. I use the microwave so that it is easier to remelt if it starts getting too thick. (If you use the paraffin, do be careful because it can ignite.) Toss a couple of bon-bons in the chocolate and then using a fork, take them out one at a time dragging the fork across the top of the bowl to remove excess chocolate and place on wax paper to harden.

I got all these from half a recipe plus half as many again that you can see in the back on the right. These candies aren't difficult to make but they do take awhile because of the chilling time.

Here's the one I snitched this morning before going down to milk the goat! ;-)