Home for Christmas

It was so nice to be home for Christmas. Being on the other side of the county for most of the year makes seeing family all that more special when I do. That being said, it was a whirlwind of a trip.

My sister and I happen to be two of those lucky people that have a birthday during the holiday season (December 30th, for me; 12/18 for her). So we all went out to dinner for our birthdays - and brought wine. Notice the date on that bottle? It's 1984 - the year I was born. My parents bought 2 cases of wine to be served at my rehearsal dinner for my wedding (a tradition my grandfather started by making wine the year each of his daughters were born for their weddings). My mom was 19 when she got married, this year I'll be 29 - good thing the wine was stored correctly!! Since I turned 21, we have been breaking out the wine every year on my birthday, just to make sure it's still good (of course). This was sooo yummy! Still good!

Another Christmas tradition in my family are a drink called Tom and Jerrys. This is basically eggnog on steroids. It consists of brandy and rum, topped with whipped eggs (the whites and yolks are whipped separately with sugar and then folded together), hot milk and nutmeg. It's an old German tradition to make these drinks. My mom tells a great story that every year, on Christmas Eve, the men would claim that they had to stay home from church to whip the eggs for the batter (since it had to be done by hand). So the women and children went to church and by the time they got back, the batter was whipped but so were all the guys! Totally schnockered. We usually serve them for our annual holiday church party and our philosophy is you get one once a year, whether you need it or not!

This is a pear coffee cake my mom made for dessert the first night I was back. She taught me to cook and I get my cooking ways from her. When we had it for dessert, she also made poached pears and a pear sauce. This was because she happened to be a Costco and got her pears there...this is so totally something I would do!! It was delicious as dessert and great for breakfast the next day. This recipe was in the most recent issue of Food and Wine magazine. I'm not sure what all was in the sauce, but it was awesome!

Here's a yule log my aunt made for Christmas Eve dinner. German chocolate theme - chocolate and coconut.

This is our Christmas Eve drink - Aperol Gin Punch. It packed a punch, that's for sure! It had Yellow Chartreuse in it - not something I've had before. It's from France and has a proprietary recipe. When we tasted it straight, it was herby with an anise forward flavor. On the sweeter side, would be great with tonic (then, I think everything would taste good with tonic). And, it claims to be the only liquor that a color is named after it.

This is my mom's dog, Romeo. She bought him a knight to ride him as one of his Christmas presents. He was happier with his new squeaky ball, I think.

What a great trip home! But I now need a vacation from my vacation...

Christmas Candy Making

It was soo nice to be home!! The trip was too short, as always, but it was jam packed! I come from a family of cooks, so of course, we cooked when I was home. My Aunt recently moved to Reno to be with my mom and my grandma, so this year, she decided we should make candy. Everyone has ways they get into the holiday spirit, usually I make cookies - but being so far from family, it's somewhat hard to get in the mood to make them. Also, I really don't know much about candy making, so I was excited. One of the things my mom and I were interested in was making fondant - you know, that stuff that covers fancy cakes? Apparently it also is the covering for chocolate covered cherries and the center of peppermint patties. Well it starts out like this:

Cook sugar, butter and corn syrup until soft ball stage. Pour onto a buttered sheet pan to cool.

Once the sugar is cool enough to the touch, it needs to be worked....a lot. Through agitation and mixing of air, there is a chemical reaction where the sugar crystallizes from a gooey mess to an opaque, mold-able candy. You can feel it happening - it turns really hot all of a sudden - so an exothermic reaction.

Next, on to make those chocolate covered cherries. First you start with a mess of maraschino cherries.

Then you cover each cherry with some fondant. You have to make sure that you cover the whole cherry, to seal in the juices.

Let the fondant on the cherries dry - or lose the tackiness.

While we were waiting for the cherries to dry, we made peppermint patties with the other batch of fondant.

Once everything is dry, it's time to dip in chocolate! With the cherries, make sure you cover the stem up a good way to seal in all the juices.

A tray of finished cherries. So I was not aware that the cream the surrounds the cherry starts as fondant. When I asked my aunt how long it takes for the fondant to liquefy, she said "I don't know, they have never lasted that long!!" Oh family.

We had tons of things to dip! It was a great day, with 3 generations of Hoper girls learning a lost art.

We put everything out in the garage for the chocolate to set.

Now what to do with all those candies? Why give them away of course! We ended up making chocolate covered orange cremes, chocolate covered chocolate mint cremes, peppermint patties, chocolate covered caramels, peanut-cranberry clusters, divinity, and chocolate covered cherries. What a great day!

Tonic Syrup

Sorry for the hiatus. Time has just gotten away from me. I still have been cooking and taking pictures! During this time, I was making Tonic Syrup. I decided to make this because I found my favorite drink to make with my limoncello is a mix of tonic, bitters and limoncello. Now I made the bitters and the limoncello, so all I needed to do was make tonic! I happened to come across this recipe a while back and squirreled it away for the future. Guess the future has come. 

According to the recipe, I had most of the ingredients from making bitters. The main ingredient in bitters is cinchona bark, from Peru. It is a natural source of quinine - what is used to treat malaria. There's your factoid for the day. The lavender was a gift from my friend Lori. I did have to order citric acid from amazon. I couldn't find fresh lemongrass but had dried from my travels to Bali.

Basically take all the ingredients, put in a pan with water and boil. Cool, then put in a jar in the fridge for a week.

Strain out the solids. Put the strained liquid in another jar and put in fridge for a week.

Then strain off liquid. There's a muddy brown sludge at the bottom of the jar, you don't want that. Then add rich syrup in equal measure to the liquid. Rich syrup is 2x sugar to water. You can use turbinado sugar to make your syrup or regular sugar. I used regular sugar. 

I found that you can add a few ounces to a liter of sparkling water (I use a Soda Stream) and that's enough. Very tasty but not really like tonic. There are a lot of complex flavors going on and it ended up being too sweet when added to the limoncello. When making this again, if my goal was to add it to something sweet like limoncello, I would use only regular simple syrup not rich syrup. But that doesn't mean I can't find something to drink this with...I found that mixed with bourbon it was delightful.

Now, not to waste the citrus that I zested, I juiced them (with carrots):

That day, I also happened to be in a waste not, want not type of mood. So I found a recipe to use the pulp from the juicer. Will let you know what I did with that at a later date...