Holiday Skill Acquisition

One of the things I most look forward to about Christmas is baking. The holiday season provides me with a good excuse to try out recipes I don't usually get to try out because my chocolate chip cookie recipe is so good that when it's just myself, the cookies are usually sufficient to satisfy my baking lust and sugar cravings. At Christmas, though, putting together plates of holiday goodies seems like a nice, holidayish thing to do, and I like to take advantage of that.

The hardest part for me is deciding what to bake out of all the hundreds of holiday recipes floating around in cookbooks and cooking blogs and baking product websites. Last year I went with a miniature cookie theme because it limited the range of recipes I could reasonably choose from. This year I decided to go outside of my comfort zone and do candy instead of cookies, and when I still couldn't narrow it down I decided to make fudge. Lots of fudge.

It was a bit of an adventure. I engaged in all sorts of daring activities, like microwaving a pound and a half of white chocolate in a melting tray designed to hold only one pound, and cooking sugar and butter to Soft Ball Stage using a candy thermometer, and purchasing artificial cherry flavoring (the most disgustingly artificial of all artificial flavors, except maybe banana, but now I have a whole bottle of it), and leaving my dog alone in an apartment with a trash can filled with chocolate shavings and fudge bits and butter wrappers and empty marshmallow creme jars.

I also experienced a few kitchen disasters, like not having any butterscotch chips, and accidentally burning a batch of fudge to the bottom of a saucepan, and scratching the bottom of said saucepan with a screwdriver while trying to remove the burnt fudge, and leaving my dog alone in an apartment with a trash can filled with chocolate shavings and fudge bits and butter wrappers and empty marshmallow creme jars.

This was not a one-night project - I took advantage of having unusually free evenings for an entire week. But now at the end of it all, I have six different kinds of fudge, slightly-improved candy-making skills, and an intense craving for carrots. Actually, most of the fudge wasn't even that hard to make. Only half required any boiling; the others were just a lot of melting and mixing. I'll share the pictures (these may be the best food pictures I've ever taken) and links to the recipes here, since I do that kind of thing on my blog, and a few of you will get to taste the results once I track down some Christmas plates. The rest of you will just have to wish you were here. Sorry. If it's any consolation, I wish you were here, too.

The fudge recipes pictured above, in order from the top right, are plain old chocolate fudge, peanut butter fudge, cherry nut fudge, Tiger Butter (chocolate peanut butter), pumpkin fudge, and cookies-and-cream fudge. I think the peanut butter was my favorite, although the two pieces pictured above are about the only ones that managed to retain all their peanut topping - I mostly ended up with a batch of peanut butter fudge with peanut-shaped dents on top. The cookies and cream was my second favorite, and one of the easiest. I used special edition holiday mint Oreos, with a pink peppermint filling, so they're pretty and tasty. The pumpkin fudge was the most intriguing on paper, but my first attempt failed (see above kitchen disasters), and my second attempt using a slightly different recipe came out crumbly. The flavor's not bad, but it's not really fudgy. Oh well. Five for six is still pretty good.

Happy December!