Gratitude Monday: sweet rituals

I think it was some time back in the 90s that I decided that baking Christmas cookies was too labor-intensive for me. All that mixing, rolling out, cutting and decorating—honestly way too much work.

So I started making candy. One batch of fudge can be divvied up into eight or even more gift baskets, after all. And toffee turns out to be pretty easy to make (once you get your head around the fact that it goes up to 300°F and you shouldn’t try tasting it after that), and it was exceedingly popular.

Then I started adding in pralines (which were actually way fiddly—if you didn’t take the syrup mix off the heat at exactly the right moment, you got something either too soft or too crumbly). And then caramels—which were a pain in the neck when time came to cut them up and wrap them. A block of hazelnut caramels is extremely stiff to slice up, and wrapping involves cutting a gazillion cellophane squares and trying to twist them around something that’s basically solidified butter with some sugar and flavor.

(I was once talking with my sister while wrapping them, and I made the mistake of muttering about how slippery the damned things were. There was a pause before she chirped, “You can buy them already wrapped, you know.” Short call, that.)

Well, after that I went in for truffles; various varieties of truffles, which only upped the chocolate splatter all over my kitchen. And bark. And glass candy.

It got to the point where every December that whole part of the house crunched, and I regularly walked out of my socks because they stuck to the kitchen floor.

The thing is, though—people get fixated on that stuff. One year I gave things that didn’t involve me melting sugar, butter and chocolate in varying permutations. I gave beautiful things, thoughtful things. The comments I got were along the lines of, “Aren’t I getting candy this year?”

In Virginia, when I gave the gift package to one friend who lived in the Shenandoah Valley, the pralines didn’t make it past the Fairfax County line. For another friend, it was the caramels that never saw Prince William County. What are ya gonna do?

I realized that I’d completely lost the plot he year I had 17 kinds of candy to apportion out among 21 bags/boxes to be shipped all over the place. I had become my own worst enemy.

So I backed off.

Since then, there’ve been a couple of years when I didn’t make candy at all. But this year, I felt in the mood. Not for the full-bore insane double digit output, but to make a few batches of a few favorites and get them out to people before Epiphany, which deadline I’ve been known to miss.

Starting on Thanksgiving day, I did just a couple of batches a day, working my way through five pounds of butter, eight pounds of sugar and six pounds of chocolate. (Listen, for the toffee alone, 18 ounces of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate only covers two batches.) And between the routine and the music I put on to sing to, I realized that candymaking is kind of a Zen thing for me, something I’m truly grateful for.

First of all—there’s the pounding of the chocolate to break it up to melt. I used to chop it; then it occurred to me that I get a sore wrist every year from going through blocks of chocolate. But pounding it with a mallet both breaks it up just fine and is really kind of therapeutic.

Then there’s the chopping of the walnuts—using a food processor just makes them into a damp Baklava-like mush, so you have to keep manually chopping them very fine in small handfuls. Chop, chop, chop, chop. I’m singing along to “My Back Pages” and chopping my little heart out, the knife just rocking back and forth across the board.

When it comes to fudge, that’s where you have to pay attention. That mixture of evaporated milk and sugar will burn in a New York instant if you don’t keep stirring it constantly from the moment you set it on the heat. Which means standing at the stove for about twelve minutes stirring until it comes to a boil, and then another eight or so before it hits the soft-ball point on the candy thermometer.

(I’ve also developed an annual ritual: ten minutes finding the church key to open the evaporated milk, because that’s pretty much the only canned thing I ever have in my house, and I only ever use the opener for this purpose.)

You have to keep stirring it, but it still kind of spits up bits of syrup. I learned a long time ago that when you’re doing this, you wear long sleeves, no matter how warm the environment might be. You have to respect the syrup.

Because—sure enough—this time it poofed a little volcano of hot milk-and-sugar straight into my hair as I was leaning over the stove trying to wipe something up.

Same with the spiced pecans—you have to stir and stir them as the mixture gets more and more syrupy to coat them completely before you pop them into the oven. And then you’ve got the aroma of five-spices and garam masala throughout your house.

It’s a very good process to go through—lining up sugar, chocolate, butter, pecans, walnuts, pans and wooden spoons along the counter. Then steadily working through each routine. To tell you the truth, I’m sick of chocolate from about the second batch of toffee; and I don’t seem to be able to keep it from splattering around the place—not even after all these years—when I’m working with it and the Bain Marie.

But I’ve got four types of confections ready to give my friends (and a trip to the Post Office in my immediate future).

And so on Gratitude Monday I’m thankful that I can make something that people really love, and which they won’t receive from anyone else. And for the ritual that has become part of me over the Christmas seasons.