Candy!

By -
Every December, I make a whole lot of candy--all dipped chocolates, like you would get in a box of chocolates.  I learned how to do it from my mom, who has done it for nearly 40 years now.  It's actually a pretty insane project, but it does make us very popular in the neighborhood.  I thought I'd tell you a bit about it.

This is the fun, quick version.  If you want to try it for yourself, check out the instructions I just posted!  I've had these up for years on a page I designed for an HTML class waaaay back in library school, but someday the college is going to notice that there is some junk from 1998 on its server and get rid of it.  It's better to transfer it all over here.


First, you need 20 pounds of very good chocolate, a whole lot of sugar and cream, and some flavoring oils.

A 10 pound bar of dark chocolate is fun to whack with a hammer.

I make several kinds of fondant for creamy centers: cream fondant makes orange and raspberry creams and cherry cordials, water fondant makes peppermint patties, and brown sugar fondant makes maple creams and peanut butter fudge.  As you can tell, this is not the kind of fondant that is now popular for coating fancy cakes and molding shapes; that stuff is nearly inedible.  This fondant tastes great!

Cooking up a cream fondant
I also make truffles.  I usually make 4 flavors: mint, orange, raspberry, and amaretto walnut.

Then there are the extra things: caramels, marshmallow clusters, and almond clusters.

Every night for a couple of weeks I melt the chocolate, form a batch of fondant into lots of centers, and dip them one by one.  It has to be quite cold so the chocolate sets up nicely, and it's a bit of a fiddly job.  Luckily I can queue up a bunch of history podcasts on my tablet and listen to them so I don't die of boredom.  Watching a movie is good too, as long as I don't plan to pay too much attention.

Raspberry centers, ready to dip
Then I spend a few days boxing the chocolate; I put each piece of candy into a bonbon cup and fill up the candy boxes.  We deliver them all around, and everyone is happy.  Only then is anyone in my house allowed to eat any candy!

Marshmallow clusters: simple and yummy

This year it's been kind of tricky to get everything done.  I had a lovely early start, but constant rain has made it very difficult to get the dipping done well.  Fooey. In fact, I have one more night to go--I just want to do some more almond clusters--but it's raining again!




Comments

  1. AODecember 11, 2012 at 9:54 PM

    nom nom nom! i love chocolate. it's great with reading or blogging and any other occasion!
    thanks for sharing this Jean! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adriana@ClassicalQuestDecember 13, 2012 at 8:00 PM

    Looks delish!

    And what a fun tradition!:)

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanDecember 13, 2012 at 10:01 PM

    Thanks! I just now finished for the year. Cleanup time. (To be honest, the crispy chocolate I make to clean up at the end is just about the best part.)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more