Contemporary Ollie Bollen

As I have explained the past few years, Ollie Bollen are a Dutch New Year's Eve tradition - deep-fried oil balls of goodness. Like a rustic Dutch doughnut. My father grew up having these as a child and now makes them for us every year. Traditional Ollie Bollen usually contain raisins or currants. However, my brother has never been much of a raisin fan, and our family likes to mix things up and try new things. We were thinking of all possible combinations we could do with the ingredients we had on hand, considering it was New Year's Eve and no stores would be open.

traditional raisin ollie bollen

In the past, we have done raisin ollie bollen, apple ollie bollen, apple and raisin ollie bollen, mixed candied fruit ollie bollen, plain ollie bollen, and chocolate chip ollie bollen. The results? Raisin ollie bollen are the traditional standard for a good reason. Apple are good, but the apple pieces can become brown and mushy. Mixed candy fruit was really good but really sticky, plain was, well, a little plain, and chocolate chip was delicious but very messy and must be done at the end of the batch because the chocolate chips will melt into the oil.

colorful candy ollie bollen

This year, my brother began thinking of new flavor combinations - how about coconut, cheese, or frosting injected? He settled with candy-coated chocolate pieces (which we figured would not melt quite as easily as chocolate chips). Then he decided on putting chopped cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookies, without the cream filling. Since the batch already contained the candies, these became candy and cookie ollie bollen. These were apparently quite good as well, though the frying oil was certainly unusable after that batch. And of course, don't forget to coat the cooked ollie bollen in icing sugar!!!

messy cookie ollie bollen