It’s that time of year, when loving hands are busiest! Our house smells like chocolate and looks like a place where lots of fun is being had.
Several projects I’ve been playing with but nothing is finished . . . I’ll tell you more soon!
And a pretty scarf is still on the loom–slow going but I like it!
And, of course, there’s candy everywhere.
This is one of the big sellers this year–English toffee!
I’m sure I know the answer to this question but how busy are your loving hands these days?!
from oldbookillustrations.com
I’ve been dancing with one partner too long.
My partner is suave and smooth but rather too insistent and demanding of my attention. He always wants to dance fast, and never to take a break, to sit one out. He has monopolized my time and kept me from others I care for.
As of right now, my dance card is open. I’ve told chocolate to take a seat; I’m going to dance with other partners.
I’m going to dance with vintage linens and selling on Etsy. That dance—the ironing and photographing and listing of beautiful things—is soothing and reliable. It’s a slow dance, my partner is a bit of a plodder, but, with him, there will be no drama, just a warm and mellow twirl around the dance floor. That sounds good right now.
I’m going to dance with quilting, my old, old friend. When we dance, I feel confident and skilled. We’ve danced together so long, it’s a pleasure to return to this partner. He knows my family, has danced with my foremothers. Dancing with him makes me feel nostalgic and at peace. That sounds good right now.
I’m going to dance with blogging. I know myself well enough to see that I’m happiest when he gets a regular dance. I feel energized and creative after each and every dance and, because he’s very social, I get to spend time with old friends and meet new ones when he’s my partner. That sounds good right now.
I’m going to dance with weaving. He’s not an easy partner but he’s very intriguing. I’ve been flirting with him for a while now, and have found him complicated and mysterious. He makes me stretch and learn new steps—I’m never bored with him. That sounds good right now.
And I’m going to save some spots for partners I haven’t met yet, just in case. That sounds good right now.
I know chocolate will be back. In fact, he asked me save the Valentine’s Day dance for him! I’m sure he’ll stop by before then, tap my current partner on the shoulder, and cut in briefly. There’s no doubt I’ll always be happy to see the smooth, old romantic and dance the quickstep again with him.
But at the moment, I’m footloose and free. I will follow Milton’s urging:
Come, and trip it as ye go,
On the light fantastick toe.
I will dance with many partners. That sounds very, very good right now.
Did you ever wonder how the liquid gets inside a chocolate-covered cherry?
Whether or not you’re a big fan of chocolate-covered cherries, or cherry cordials, you have to admit they have a special place in the pantheon of the gods of chocolate candies. They are unremittingly sweet and gooey and have that liquid stuff in the middle that is messy, fun, and sort of mysterious.
How did it get there?
I used to imagine someone, maybe an elf or an Oompa Loompa, with a syringe, injecting each and every bonbon with a little gooey syrup.
The truth is both simpler and more magical than that. And I am prepared to share that secret with you.
You are being invited into the inner sanctum of sweets, the cabal of candy, to join the chosen few who know how they put the cordial in the cherry cordials.
Last week, when my fellow Americans were roasting turkeys and stuffing them with stuffing, I took a day off from candy making . . . and made candy.
At our friends’ annual Christmas Eve party last year, while in the throes of holiday cheer and good red wine, I indulged in a little self-aggrandizement and bragged about being able to make cherry cordials.
One of the other guests at the party allowed as how he loved chocolate-covered cherries better than almost anything and I, in my warm, cheerful haze, promised to make him some, to be delivered at this year’s party which, it occurred to me, is soon!
So, I took Thanksgiving Day off from making candy to sell and made candy to keep a promise. Such is the price of self-aggrandizement.
Making chocolate-covered cherries is a multi-step process. It involves making fondant, coating each cherry with the fondant, and then dipping the cherries in tempered chocolate.
Oh, and the most important step—waiting, waiting for the syrup to appear, like an alchemist’s dream, within the chocolate shell.
First, I made fondant, really just cooked sugar syrup, which stayed creamy while I dipped maraschino cherries into it but then hardened to a white, opaque shell. The fondant would stay hard, white, and opaque forever (which would make for a really unsatisfying chocolate-covered cherry experience) except . . . for the secret.
Shhh . . . come closer.
The secret is invertase.
Invertase is an enzyme that changes sugar to liquid or, in plain terms, it “catalyzes the hydrolysis of sucrose.”
A tiny bit of invertase, added to the fondant, will turn that hard, white, opaque shell to sweet, sticky syrup, syrup to dribble down your chin as you gobble one cherry cordial after another.
The switchover from solid to liquid is a bit of a delayed reaction. I had plenty of time to dip the cherries into the fondant, let the fondant harden, temper the chocolate, and dip the cherries into the chocolate before the transformation began.
In fact, my recipe for these candies says that the cherries will need to sit for 10 days to allow the magic to happen.
Luckily for me, and my burning desire to start snacking, the change really occurs much more quickly than that. Within a half hour of dipping the chocolates, I could start to see a bit of sugar syrup oozing, already, out of a tiny break in the chocolate shell.
Abracadabra! Magic in the making!
And it continues. By the Christmas Eve party, I should have a couple of dozen chocolate-covered cherries to take along, to fulfill my promise.
I would never make these candies to sell. Making the fondant is too unpredictable, at least for me. In honesty, I screwed up the first batch I made last week and had to start all over again!
The process is even more laborious than other candy making with more waste, since even a tiny air bubble in the chocolate shell will become a weak spot from which the syrup will ooze. Trust me, if you end up with a syrup-less cherry in an empty chocolate shell, it simply isn’t magic any more.
And, while leaving the stems on the cherries, those sweet little handles, makes dipping the cherries so easy, it makes packaging the finished candy impossible—just ask the people who have, in the past, received ooey-gooey packages of exploded candy in the mail from me.
This was candy making simply for pleasure and that’s its own kind of magic. It was nice to make candy just for the fun of it, just for the challenge, with little pressure, and to make people happy. And it gave me the opportunity to share this particular secret of the universe with you.
But, remember—it’s a secret. Just between you and me.
Do your days have a rhythm? Is there a predictable tempo to your hours? Or are your days spontaneous and varied dances of delight?
At this time of year, my days have an undeniable rhythm, a driving tempo. Much of the day is filled with an insistent, relentless beat, as I work to make the candy I sell.
The winter holidays bring busy times—people are willing to splurge on handmade candies for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, for gifts, for parties—so I’m always pretty busy in November.
But this year, I’m also doing two holiday boutiques, two selling shows, where people walk by my table, taste a sample of chocolate, and buy.
Last summer, when I agreed to these shows, on two consecutive days in early December, it seemed like a great idea!
Right now, I can’t help but wonder what I was thinking. I know people will want to buy candy but I can’t predict just exactly which candy they will want or how much to have on hand.
So, I spend my days piling boxes of chocolates up, and working obsessively to make more. The tempos of my life right now are staccato, presto, agitato.
But not first thing in the morning. I am committed to start my day, early, early, at a different pace—this is the calm before the candy.
I am an early riser, usually up by 4:30. I have my ritual to begin my day. It is set to adagio and, certainly, pianissimo.
I feed the cats. I give the diabetic cat an injection. I make a cup of coffee, black. I visit a set list of websites, in a set order—NBC News, the National Weather Service, the local newspaper. I write in my personal journal and have another cup of coffee, black.
I take some time to visit with you, to see what you’re saying and doing. I read your thoughts and respond, as much as possible, before the rhythm changes and the day demands my participation.
I love the calm before the candy. My husband sleeps a few rooms away. The cats go back to bed, too. I am alone with my thoughts.
I plan what needs to be done, and everything seems possible! I know I can get so much accomplished because the day stretches out in front of me, full of open hours and promise.
About 6:00, the rhythm switches to accelerato, allegro, animato. If, by this time, I haven’t taken a shower, written a blog post, finished reading yours, it probably won’t get done today.
The chaos of the candy takes over, the cacophony, the movement toward crescendo.
Happily, for me, this fast-paced rhythm lasts only for a month or two. January will bring a quieter time, slower tempos, with fewer demands for quick-step dancing in the kitchen.
I’ll return to the rocking rhythm of hand quilting, the soothing back and forth of throwing the shuttle, and the warm, comforting slide of the iron over vintage linens. I may even fit in a spontaneous dance of delight or two!
I’ll have more time for me, then, and for you.
A chocolatier. That’s me—it sounds pretty glamorous, doesn’t it?
It sounds glamorous if, when you read that word, you pronounce it in your head as “cha-ko-la-tee-ay,” with French verve. If you pronounce it in your head to rhyme with “musketeer,” it just sounds like I should be hanging out with my pal, D’Artagnan.
Most of the time I just tell people that I make candy.
These days, most of my waking hours are filled with candy—either the actual making of it or any of the other activities that go along with its selling. It isn’t especially glamorous, or difficult, for that matter.
In fact, it’s like all of the other crafts that you and I do—there’s a process involved and skills to master. Some aspects are mindless and repetitive aspects, but rather soothing. Some aspects I don’t especially care for. Other aspects are fun and creative, and keep me coming back.
I don’t make candy to make a living. I make candy because I like to make candy, just as I like to quilt and I like to weave. But, unlike quilting and weaving, candy piles up fast and that can cause its own dilemmas. I sell candy so I can justify making more, to experiment and try new things, without having to eat it all myself.
I’ve had glimpses of what goes on in a small, but commercial, bricks-and-mortar candy shop. Even small places have huge vats of chocolate that is tempered by machine. They have conveyor belts that bring candies under a stream of chocolate to enrobe them. One shop even had a spray (think of the spray nozzle at your kitchen sink) through which they could deliver chocolate over popcorn—so cool!
My operation is very different. At times, I may be making candy to fill one order from my Etsy shop—just one small pan of caramels or gianduja. At other times, like right now, I’m working on a slightly larger scale because I’m getting ready for a show where I sell candy face-to-face and may need a total of, say, 250 or 300 boxes of chocolates.
Almost every candy I make is a multi-stage process so, when I’m making a lot of candies, my days will be organized around the steps. Some days will be focused on making the “innards,” as I think of them, and other days will focus on enrobing, or dipping, the candy innards in chocolate.
When I make the innards, I work in small batches, and usually produce 50 to 200 candies at a time.
I make lots of caramels, which are the most time consuming of the innards. The pan of caramels takes about 2 hours to cook, and I need to pay attention but I can walk away from it if I have to. Other processes go quickly—English toffee, for instance, takes only about 15 minutes to cook and spread in the pan—but I have to be super attentive or end up with a scorched, nasty mess.
Making any of the innards depends on paying careful attention to temperature, so using a candy thermometer is essential. And, since I’ve never met a candy thermometer that I felt I could really, really trust, I also use the old tried-and-true cold-water test.
The cold-water test is based on the principle that cooked candy will react in predictable ways when spooned into ice water. For instance, if I spoon a little caramel into ice water and wait a few seconds, I want the caramel to form a fairly firm ball in my fingers when I pick it up. Other concoctions behave differently. There’s some experience and judgment that factors into this but it’s a time-honored and reliable way to judge readiness.
Once the candy is cooked and has cooled, I have to cut it. This is kind of a drag. If I were ever going to try to get bigger as a candy maker (and I’m not!), I’d want a gizmo called a guitar. The guitar is composed of a frame with taut strings set at intervals, which can be pressed down on a slab of candy to cut it. A home-based candy maker is more likely to use a big knife, maybe lightly oiled, and use either a ruler or cut the pieces by eye. I think it’s charming when the candies vary a little in size, don’t you?
The next step is the critical one that makes me a chocolatier—tempering chocolate. Some people who make candy use melted chocolate chips, a little bit of chocolate but lots of other stuff, too. Others use the so-called “candy melts,” which, you may notice, don’t claim to be chocolate at all, because they aren’t!
Anyone who wants to make really good candy learns to temper chocolate. To read about this, you might think it’s some sort of magical, mystery process but it’s pretty straightforward, kind of time-consuming, and just takes practice to get it right.
What is it? Tempering chocolate means melting quality, real chocolate and then cooling it in a controlled way to bring about a transformation of the chocolate. Some people temper chocolate on a marble slab and others do it with a technique called “seeding,” or adding unmelted chocolate to the melted in a particular way.
The desired outcome is the same. One tempers chocolate so that it will set without being refrigerated, it will stay set at room temperature, it will set with a high gloss, and it will have the “snap” that we expect in excellent chocolate. When you dip candy innards into tempered chocolate, it coats them easily and smoothly and the extra sort of cascades off, to leave a thin shell, smooth and shiny.
Untempered chocolate will look dull, often have streaks or a grainy texture, and will be difficult to use. It won’t ever set, unless refrigerated, and will start to melt again at room temperature. If you dip candy into it, it may lump up, and stay thick and coarse. Why bother with chocolate at all, if it is going to be so unappetizing?!
I have considered buying a tempering machine designed for home use, which would bring melted chocolate to the necessary temperatures and hold it there and, in theory, save me some trouble. But, try as I have, I‘ve never found one that gets good reviews from users and, for the $1000 I’d need to spend, I’d want it to make my life easier!
So, I spend a lot of time tempering chocolate by hand. I may temper 3 pounds at a time. I melt the chocolate to specific temperatures, depending on whether it’s dark, milk, or white chocolate, and then bring those temperatures down again. It takes about 30 minutes of constant stirring to temper chocolate, and it can’t be rushed.
Dipping or enrobing the innards comes next—this is one of my favorite parts! Sometimes I use a ladle to slather chocolate on bigger items. Sometimes I use a mold. Mostly I use a special little fork and a big bowl of tempered chocolate, and dip the candies one by one.
I get all set up and then I get in the zone.
I put my bowl of tempered chocolate on a heating pad, to keep it at the right temperature so it doesn’t lose its temper (because that causes me to lose mine!) I get all organized with any garnishes and my other tools, and I dip, tap, tap, tap.
I put one piece candy in the chocolate, turn it with the fork, scoop it up, slide it across the edge of the bowl and tap, tap, tap to remove the excess chocolate (according to a watchful friend, I tap about 12-14 times per piece). Then I slide it onto parchment paper.
Then I do another. And another. I stop after about 5 candies and either make my perfect swirl (the easiest trick in candy making!) or add garnishes. Either of these things needs to be done before the chocolate starts to set, which explains having to stop dipping frequently. I stop after every 20 or 30 candies to stir and check the temperature of the chocolate and adjust my heating pad, if necessary.
While I dip my little chocolates, I think deep thoughts. What in the world can I blog about next? How long before I can eat lunch? What will I eat for lunch? How in world did I get chocolate there?
Once I have all the candies enrobed and the chocolate has set completely, and I’ve cleaned up my mess and licked the spoon and my bowl, I trim the candy to remove excess chocolate around the foot.
The only task left is to package the candy. This is probably my least favorite part of the process but it has to be done!
I weigh out the candies, then I put them in little candy paper cups. I arrange them in the glossy white box and make sure they look pretty. I label the box. I seal the box with my little “KerryCan” sticker. I move on to the next box. The boxes pile up in a most satisfying way.
Candy making, as you can see, is a lot like knitting or quilting or writing a blog post—lots of persnickety details, some more fun than others. It gets easier to do effectively when you do it regularly. It involves some skill and technique but even more simple concentration and attention to detail.
The outcome may not be glamorous but it is always pleasing and, when others see your work and tell you they love what you’ve created, it feels pretty fine!
Here in the northern hemisphere, we’re preparing for winter. Yes, it’s only September and we still have weeks of splendid autumn to enjoy but we all know what’s coming after that. We see the inevitable signs.
The geese are flying south, the squirrels are gathering acorns, the cats are finding patches of sun to in which to park and nap.
We, the people, need to prepare, too; we can’t let winter catch us unawares. We’re putting the gardens to bed, doing outdoor chores, pulling out recipes for soups and slow-cooker meals.
Winter is the time for hunkering down, for working indoors, for getting in touch with the heart of the home again, for making our own warmth to sustain us.
Here, at out house in upstate New York, the warmth comes from the kitchen, the loom, the quilt frame.
I need to be ready. I’m lining up projects and feathering my nest. I’m doing the chores that will ensure a happy, productive winter.
I’ve spent a lot of time this past week assessing my readiness for candy season. As you may recall, I make and sell chocolates between October and May, so I have been gathering ingredients, deciding how much chocolate I need to buy, and finding the pans and bowls and spatulas I put away months ago. I finally located the candy thermometer and today will look for the candy boxes and labels I stored, to see if I need to order more.
I don’t particularly enjoy all this organizing and planning—I like making the candy! But I need to do these chores so I’m ready for the fun part.
I’ve also been making decisions about a weaving project. I don’t want to stop weaving but, right now, I don’t have the time or inclination to start anything challenging or fancy or artsy. I’ll leave that kind of weaving to my husband; I’m going to make some dishtowels. Some nice dishtowels, in a cotton and linen blend, off-white, with a red stripe down the sides, just like the vintage towels I love so much! Once I get the loom set up, I can weave a few inches whenever I please and watch the fabric grow like magic.
I don’t particularly enjoy all this measuring and planning—I like weaving! But I need to do these chores so I’m ready for the fun part.
My other preparation for winter involves quilting. I haven’t done any quilt-related work since I finished the 1812 quilt, and I miss it. Winter is the perfect time to do hand quilting because it means settling yourself beneath the quilt, while you stitch, warm in your cocoon.
As you know, I love college football and will watch any team play, any time. I want to get a quilt top basted and ready to quilt so I can work on it while I watch football. As it happens, I have quilt tops made by my grandmother’s aunt and by my husband’s grandmother, beautiful hand-pieced vintage tops, just waiting for me to finish them. I’ve picked one and will buy backing fabric this week.
I don’t particularly enjoy all this basting and planning—I like quilting! But I need to do these chores so I’m ready for the fun part.
The chores need to be done so, during winter, we can be secure and productive and content as the cold winds whip the snow into drifts around us.
How do you prepare for a comfy, cozy winter? Have you begun your chores?
photo by Alison Hurt
Listen—did you hear that? That was the sound of the door closing on my candy shop, for the 2013-2014 season.
One of the best things about working with chocolate is that you can’t do it when it’s warm. Chocolate simply cannot be tempered if the temperature is above about 70 degrees. So, as a home-based chocolatier, with no interest in a bigger operation, the coming of summer means the end of chocolate making. Right when I want to do other things, I can!
I just finished dipping the last of the candy that I will take to a spring boutique later this week. Last week, I deactivated the candy listings on Etsy. I’m out of the chocolate business until October!
I’m both happy and a bit verklempt about the end of the season. It was a good year, and very busy. I plowed through the 230 pounds of Callebaut chocolate I wrote about in August and had to order 55 pounds more of milk chocolate. That adds up to something like 700,000 calories worth of chocolate, spread around the US!
I did my first-ever face-to-face sale in December and it went so well I’m doing another on Wednesday, with a lot let angst this time.
I developed some new candies, most notably lemon meltaways and Irish cream meltaways, both with silky smooth flavored-chocolate innards, dipped in more chocolate. I also added delicate, crispy English toffee to my offerings.
I’ll miss my little morning routine of drinking my coffee, getting caught up with the news, and putting on my apron. I mostly make candy in the very early morning and those hours will be open to me now.
I’ll miss the smells—the chocolate, of course, the caramel bubbling on the stove, the mint oil, the peanut butter. And I’ll miss the heavy responsibility of taste testing!
But, as they say, when one door closes, another opens.
It is finally beginning to be spring in upstate New York so the door opens to lawn and gardens, and they need a lot of work.
The door opens to the linen closet, too—I have been very lax about listing vintage linens on Etsy and those piles of pretty linens are not getting any smaller!
The door will open soon to another glorious summer on beautiful Lake Champlain and summer activities—bike rides to go for soft ice cream, garage sales, campfires, and s’mores, and family time.
Who wants to be in the kitchen, making candy, when there’s so much else to do?!
So, I’ll go downstate and sell candy for one more day. I’ll stash any leftovers for sampling and sharing over the summer. I’ll put away the candy equipment and ingredients and soak my apron in Oxi-Clean to get the chocolate out.
And I’ll go outside, to play in the sun. I’ll weave things and finish a quilt. I’ll talk to you and do a lot of ironing of pretty things. I’ll get back to that list of things I’ve been meaning to do (IBMTD)!
And, along about September, I’ll start yearning for the smell of melted chocolate and the comfort of the candy-making routine. And then the door will open again. . .
Today is the highest of the high holidays of chocolate. Nestled between Halloween and Christmas on one side and Easter and Mothers’ Day on the other, confection affection reaches a frenzy for Valentine’s Day.
And that means, once again, chocolate has oozed its sweet, smooth, silky self into all my waking hours. I’ve been sending chocolates all over the United States, to help people show their love to far-flung friends, lovers, and relatives.
It’s great fun to be part of this celebration, as folks try to decide just what combination of candies will best please their loved ones. All dark chocolate for some, no dark chocolate for others. No lemon or pumpkin seeds, please, but extra ginger or coconut would be great! Tastes are so individual and givers want everything to be perfect, especially on this day.
I also love writing up the note cards to accompany the candy I mail. I make up little stories to fit the odd or mysterious sentiments and imagine how pleased the daddy will be to get the candy from his children.
People aren’t just treating their love ones. I’m here to tell you that LOTS of people are treating themselves. As we’ve always been told, you need to love yourself first!
To be honest, all of this intense focus on chocolate means that it sort of loses its Valentine’s Day cachet for me. When you have chocolates on every free surface and are honor bound to do regular taste testing, you don’t need a special holiday devoted to chocolate! Every day is chocolate day!
As for my Valentine and me, we’ll celebrate by shoveling the most recent foot of snow. Then we’re planning a dinner that will evoke warmth and summer and picnics—Michigans, coleslaw, potato salad. If I’m lucky, my Valentine will play some “honey songs” on the guitar for me. And we’ll probably have some chocolate but we do that everyday!
And, in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that I almost never make truffles—I just couldn’t resist that blog title.
Truffles are so incredibly easy to make (2-3 ingredients and no need to temper chocolate?!), it seems wrong to take money for making them! And, the fact that they depend heavily on cream means that they aren’t as shelf stable as a lot of candy so mailing them and taking the risk that they might spoil unnerves me.
So instead of truffles, I make chocolate melt aways, combining tempered chocolate with a little coconut oil and flavoring oil. And, even though I just said I don’t get too excited about chocolate on Valentine’s Day, an Irish cream melt away might just get me to re-consider!
I hope your Valentine’s Day brings a happy balance of affection and confections!
I spent the early morning hours with family. “Big deal, Kerry,” you say. “It’s Thanksgiving in the United States and most Americans are spending it with family.”
But I spent my morning with a grandmother who has been dead since I was 12, two cousins who live hundreds of miles away, and a sister sound asleep in the guest room.
No, I didn’t have a séance and I wasn’t Skyping. I spent the last three hours wrapping a gazillion (really—I counted) little squares of caramel in a gazillion little squares of waxed paper.
As I stood at the counter and wrapped, I daydreamed and I am, if I say it myself, a world-class daydreamer.
I daydreamed about my history with wrapping caramels.
Caramels have been a part of the winter holidays for me for, literally, my whole life. I grew up on a farm and my grandmother made caramels (and divinity) only at this time of year, for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so it was a big event.
I’m still using her recipe—it takes a full two hours or more to make a batch and involves instructions like, “add the milk, drop by drop. Add the butter, bit by bit.” We kids—my sister and two cousins and I—weren’t encouraged to be around while the caramel was cooking because the hot syrup can cause the most awful burns but, once the caramel was poured and had time to set, our work began.
We were the caramel wrappers! We didn’t see this as work at all. Or, if it was work, it came with great benefits! I’m sure we didn’t eat as many as we wrapped but I’m also sure we needed some time outside after we were done, to work off the sugar high.
My grandmother would carpet the kitchen table with little squares of waxed paper, cut the caramel into strips, and cut little pieces—plop, plop, plop—onto the paper. Little hands would pick up each square, wrap the waxed paper around and twist the ends to seal the caramels in.
Nowadays, a lot of my caramel gets dipped in chocolate or added to some other candy, like turtle bark or candy bars. The chocolate-covered fleur de sel caramels are by far my best-selling item.
But sometimes, I do get orders for the pure, unadulterated caramels and, as was the case this morning, I find myself wrapping little bites of caramel in squares of waxed paper.
And my mind wanders to a different warm kitchen, four little girl cousins, a plump farm grandmother, sweets made with loving hands at home—a scene out of Norman Rockwell and perfect for daydreams and happy memories. Wrapping caramels still comes with benefits.
I hope you have the chance to daydream and enjoy family memories on your day of thanksgiving!
It’s a rainy, cool autumn morning in the North Country, the kind that engages your senses in a variety of ways. Right now, I’m most aware of my sense of smell because my whole house carries the scent of warm ginger.
Lots of people seem to associate maple with fall but I think ginger is the signature scent. Don’t get me wrong—I have maple in my blood. I grew up on a farm where we made maple syrup, but, to me, maple is a spring thing—that’s when the sap is running and the boiling down occurs, to turn that sap into heaven.
Ginger is warm and cozy—like a favorite sweater on a cool day. I love that it has a spicy zip to it, too. I’m making ginger caramels, which involves infusing cream with fresh ginger root and then adding that to the other caramel ingredients and letting the whole thing burble for a couple of hours.
When the caramel reaches the “soft ball” stage, I’ll add finely chopped crystallized ginger and let them set. They’re amazing just cut into squares—like Reed’s Ginger Chews only creamier—but I’ll dip some in dark chocolate, too, because I am of the opinion that dark chocolate makes most things taste better!
I have more fresh ginger root and crystallized ginger on hand so I think my next step is to try these Triple Ginger Cookies. I’ll let you know how they turn out!
What is your go-to fall scent? Pumpkin? Apple? Cinnamon? Or do you love ginger, too?
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If you make caramels and want the details about giving them a jolt with ginger, let me know!
Love Those "Hands at Home" 