Cutting caramels while my grandfather cuts the wax paper and my grandmother wraps them.
For the last few days, I’ve been lucky enough to spend it baking cookies and making candies with my grandparents. There’s eight of us spending Christmas together this year and so it was a great time to try out a few new types of cookies than the usual suspects.
Typically, my parents and I usually make yerbys, my grandmother’s sugar cookies, peanut butter blossoms, and buckeyes. I love all of those, but I’d been itching to make the almond and vanilla-flavored candy cane cookies and the pecan snowballs and once I found out that the candy cane cookies were a fave of my mom’s and the snowballs are a fave of my grandfather’s, I decided that they were a must bake. To the mix I added in the gingerbread caramels (no boiling over this time with the 8-quart pot), unreasonably addictive peanut butter oatmeal cookies, and molasses crackles.
Dessicated candy canes!
My grandmother is an expert at making the snowballs, candy cane cookies, and molasses crackles, so she showed me her little tricks as we went along like how to know when the snowballs are done (they’re a little dry on top to the touch but not brown) and to roll them in confectioner’s sugar when they’re still warm.
Speechless.
Then, yesterday, I got to take a trip with all the ladies to Norman Love, an incredible chocolatier based in Fort Myers, Florida. He’s created bags for the Oscars and his colors are just stunning. They make me want to buy an airbrush and spend weeks in the kitchen creating intricate designs out of cocoa butter. According to his dad – I chatted him up when I was there as Norman himself was busy as it was December 22nd – he’s mostly self-taught (though his site says he studied in France, but perhaps that was an apprenticeship so I’ll have to check more into this) – and went on to serve as the executive pastry chef of the Beverly Hills Hotel (where Jose Andres’ The Bazaar is now located) and also of the Ritz-Carlton Hotels. He even managed to lead the U.S. team to win a bronze medal at the Coup du Monde de la Patisserie in 1999. Considering they were up against teams from 18 different countries (and a ton of French pastry chefs), that’s pretty impressive.
I picked up 15 different flavors and will report on what they taste like. Pretty sure they’re going to rock.