Easy Delicious Snack: Nut Balls

My husband's grandmother (my grandmother in law?) has recently been giving us a ton of old cookbooks that she has collected over the years after finding out that I like them. Well, I kind of feel like I hit the jackpot because there are some really really cool ones in there. There are also a lot of other ones, so we need to eventually go through them all (when I say a ton, I mean a ton, we must have well over a hundred by now). But in the mean time, I thought it would be fun to open one once in a while and try a recipe and post it if it is good. All of our Christmas Eve recipes that we made came from these books and we had a lot of fun with them. One recipe that I really like as a snack food was for "Chestnut Balls". I love chestnuts, but only buy them once a year because of their high cost. These remind me of a sort of baked falafal and I think you could do them with any nut. I followed the recipe exactly and added a little maple syrup to give balance out the dry taste that chestnuts have. Also, the recipe calls for "riced" chestnuts, but I just used ground.

2 cups ground chestnuts- I used a food processor
3 TBS butter
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
2 TBS heavy cream
some ground pepper
1-2 TBS maple syrup

Grind everything in a food processor and roll into size ball of choice, stick mixture in the fridge for a while first to help roll
Bake at 375 for about 20 min or until they feel solid

The recipe called for frying them. After an unsuccessful attempt at frying them in shallow butter, we reformed the and decided to try baking. That worked out really well. If I had lard or another appropriate deep fry fat I could have tried it, but I have never deep fried before and I like how light these tasted without lots of extra oil. We put them out with dinner and everyone kept asking us what kind of meatballs they were. I made them again later in the week to have on hand as snack. They are easy to transport and keep on hand and, I think, more interesting than plain nuts. I would like to try them with some crispy (soaked and dehydrated) nuts one day.