As noted previously on Slashfood, there was a time when candymaking was an expected part of a homemaker's repertoire. The holidays evoke nostalgia, so is candymaking too far a taffy-stretch for December's annual kitchen marathons? Something's got to fill all of those stockings being hung by all of those chimneys with care, and handmade candy exudes charm and tastes good.
Into this fray enters cookbook author Lou Seibert Pappas. Her Christmas Candy Book is a small but thorough indoctrination into the world of bubbling syrups, satiny molten chocolate, silken fondant, springy mazzetta, colorful pastes, gooey clusters, and sticky peels. There are sweetly staged photographs, easily followed recipes and a short history of confectionery (including a section on Christmas candy), with a list of techniques, tools, and those wonderful charts that use phrases like "hard crack stage." (Note to Santa: I now expect to find a candy hammer in my stocking, and promise to respond with enough peanut brittle [page 36] to tear out the molars of all nine reindeer. If reindeer have molars.).
It's Christmas evening and I'm sitting around the fire at my parent's
house with my favorite baking partners: my sister Abby and my babysitter Katie, a family friend. We're mulling over
that question that irks every girl who got a couple of new baking toys and has a Costco bag of chocolate chips to use
up: what, exactly, should I bake?
What Can I Get You Folks? - Eating Out for Thanksgiving
In Defense of Guy Fieri
'Top Chef Vegas' - And Then There Were Five
