Adventures in Candy Making

I'm taking a brief respite from blogging about my internship to post an interlude on candy making. As I posted a couple of years ago, candy making was a long-standing tradition started and kept alive by my grandmother until she died. While we (my mom, sister, and I) did attempt to re-ignite the candy making tradition when the post above was written, we never tried to recreate the hand-dipped chocolates that my grandmother was so famous for (well, famous in her circles; she never had the President or the Pope knocking on her door begging for sweets). For me, it was partly due to knowing the candy would not be just like Gramma's, and partly because I couldn't find a recipe that suited me. I did take another step towards the chocolates when I made peanut butter balls this last Christmas. The filling had to be rolled in small balls and dipped in candy coating, an apprentice training if you will for what my grandmother did.

And then yesterday, I got a bee in my bonnet. I had planned on attempting hand-dipped chocolates for Christmas as well as the peanut butter balls because I finally found a recipe for them that I wanted to try. I had even purchased all the ingredients. However, the experiment didn't even happen because I ran out of time and the weather wasn't right (more on that later). But yesterday the stars came into alignment--no, not really--and I made my very first batch of hand-dipped chocolates. Raspberry ones, that tasted almost just like Gramma's. Here is the basic filling recipe.

What you'll need:
2 1/2 lbs. confectioner's sugar
1 c. sweetened condensed milk (not evaporated)
1 cube softened butter
2 Tbs. flavoring (choose your favorite)
Food coloring (optional)

What you'll need to do:
1. In a large bowl, mix together all of the ingredients. You'll want to act fast (see the tips below), so I recommend using an electric mixer to initially mix everything and finishing with your hands to get the dough to come together.
2. Take a portion of the dough and immediately cover what you don't use. Roll out the portion you have into a log and cut into small same-sized pieces. Roll the pieces into balls, place on a baking sheet covered with wax paper, cover everything with plastic wrap, and chill in the fridge for a couple of hours.
3. Remove from fridge and dip in melted chocolate (see tips). Place back on wax paper, put baking sheet(s) on a table or counter top, and let set for a couple of hours or until chocolate is firm before boxing up.

Candy Making Tips
Here's a few things I have learned from my grandmother and from yesterday's experiment:
1. I prefer a mixture of unsweetened and semi-sweet chocolate for dipping. A good ratio is 1 part unsweetened for 2 parts semi-sweet. The candy centers are sweet enough that you don't want to add chocolate containing too much sugar. Choose a brand that you prefer. My grandmother always used Ghirardelli, but yesterday's batch was made with another brand and still tasted quite good.
2. You can microwave the chocolate to melt it! Seriously, you don't need a double-boiler pot. Just put it in a microwave-safe bowl and heat it in 30-second intervals, mixing between intervals until the chocolate is completely melted and combined. You may need to reheat in 30-second intervals as you are dipping (I had to).
3. Do not melt your chocolate or dip your candies on a day of high humidity. This was something my grandmother always told me, and I have memories of her scrambling to get the chocolate made on a sunny November day before the fog and rain returned. I never truly understood this until I saw how the chocolate behaved yesterday. The chocolate takes a long time to set (mine took a couple of hours) and extra humidity in the air will create both a longer setting time and make the chocolate slightly discolored. It behaves completely differently from chocolate candy coating, as the candy coating has additional additives that make it set much faster and I was able to make my peanut butter balls (which use the chocolate candy coating) with cloudy/foggy skies and had no problem.
4. Flavorings can be found at local supermarkets. Mine had the raspberry flavoring I used and a mint one that I also bought and have yet to try. If you use only vanilla for your flavoring, you may want to only use about 1-2 tsp (instead of the listed amount), otherwise the vanilla flavor could be overpowering.
5. Food coloring is a fun addition, especially if you match it with the flavor you use. I used a bit of red food coloring for my raspberry chocolates. If I had made a batch of mint, I would have added green. I would recommend a liquid food coloring rather than a paste-based one (like the types used for cake frosting, for example Wilton). The liquid mixes better with the dough. Also, the color was streaky on my filling until I worked with it and rolled it into balls; then the color became consistent.
6. The dough will dry out fast! That is why you want to cover any portion you are not currently working with. Also, I moistened a paper towel and lightly dampened my hands every so often to keep the moisture from drawing out of the dough as I rolled it. That definitely helped too.
7. Lastly, the filling recipe above will make LOTS of candy. I mean dozens of candies, pounds of candies, millions and billions and trillions of candies. Ok, maybe not that much, but it makes more than can be reasonably eaten by a small group of people. So unless you are giving a lot of it away, use no more than half the recipe. I found this out the hard way. Learn from my mistake.

I have a lot of leftover dough currently double-bagged and in my freezer. I'm attempting to see if I can make the filling ahead of time and still have it taste/feel the way it should when I thaw it out to dip the chocolates. I'll be sure to post the success or failure of that test.

But as for now, I'm enjoying my raspberry chocolates.

Another semester beginning

I'm starting a new semester, and one that is solely concentrated content-wise on web work. I'm taking a class on the Drupal platform, something that I'm seeing more and more often in website design, and a "program" that I felt I should be familiar with given its rising popularity--including as the method of delivery on library websites. I'm really looking forward to this class because it will be another tool in my toolbox and will allow me to develop pages that are clean, attractive, and functional. Drupal is pretty darn cool in that there is so much you can do with it. Every site I've seen that uses it looks and feels completely different while still all starting from the same set of functions and options, a testament to the wide variability in what you can get it to do for you.

It actually pairs quite nicely with the internship I've also managed to get. I'll be doing a virtual internship with the Marin County Free Library (see their website at http://www.marinlibrary.org/) and working with their Electronic Services department. And what is a virtual internship? I hear you ask. Well, it's an internship doing real work from a remote location. I won't be on site and I get to have control of when I do the work (provided I maintain the hours per week required by the internship), which is good since I also work full-time. I'll being doing projects that involve their public and staff websites, both of which run on--you guessed it--Drupal. So I'll be able to (hopefully) apply concepts from class to the real-world scenarios I'll be encountering during the course of my internship. I'm really excited about that because it will give me professional experience and help me continue developing soft skills since I will be coordinating with my internship supervisor, fellow internee, and potentially other MCFL staff.

So, there will be more activity on my blog, as I am required to make weekly posts related to my internship--things I'm doing/seeing/experiencing/learning. So you, dear reader, will read about this as I live it. And hopefully I'll be breaking up the ongoing academic commentary with more recipes, pictures of Jaybird, and my thoughts on issues in the profession.

Until next time...

The Miracle of Life

Yes, I know--cheesy title. But very appropriate for this post. Last Monday (January 14th) I helped welcome my nephew and godson into the world. The baby boy is the first son of my best friend K and her husband. Baby boy's birth was an exciting, terrifying, exhilarating and draining experience (I have no children of my own and had never experienced a delivery before), but it was an event I would not have missed for the world. It's something I can't help but share, along with this picture (posted with mom's permission).

Now I'm going to brag (just a bit), but not about me. K and hubby were and are an incredible team, and it's obvious at least to me that they are very much meant to be parents. They so obviously love their boy (who wouldn't be with that little face?) and very happy despite now being sleep-deprived as many (all?) parents are when their baby first comes home.

And I love this child. I've known him for just over a week and have spent a total of almost three hours of quality time with him, and already I know he has me wrapped around his little finger. To borrow from Dana Carvey, "his cuteness is making me weak." Sorry K, but I can't guarantee that I will be very good with laying down the law with this kid. I am so thrilled and honored to be a part of his life. We have many good years ahead of us, and I look forward to seeing him grow up.

And because I'm sure this is not the last time I will mention him, baby boy's name in my blog will be Jaybird. Another well-deserved congratulations to the new parents!