‘Tis the season! Holiday baking for cookie exchanges, Christmas gifts, entertaining and don’t forget the Cookie Walk on Saturday at Christ Methodist Church! Be there sharply at 9:00 so you can get the best pick of the sugarplum cookie visions. (401 High Street, Chestertown)
I am trying to simplify this year, as I say at the beginning of each Christmas season, and very shortly thereafter we are generally wading through my complications. I don’t have to help with a Holiday Pageant this year, there is one positive!
My baking assistants are off at college, so I do not have the extra hands to set up an assembly line mixing dough, rolling the dough, cutting cookies, baking, cooling and decorating. The thought is just exhausting! Instead, this year I will bake luscious bars, which are generally simple, satisfying and completely sinful.
I always do fudge, which became a holiday party staple during my sojourn at the local newspaper. I love it because it tastes deceptively dense and complicated, as if I had stood for hours over my warm Aga, with a fistful of exotic free-market cocoa beans, brandishing my trusty candy thermometer. I am sorry to disappoint, but this is the easiest recipe I know that requires more than peanut butter, a knife and a slice of bread.
Foolproof Fudge
3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 (14 oz.) can Sweetened Condensed Milk
Dash salt
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Line 9” x 9” pan with parchment paper.
Melt the chocolate chips with sweetened condensed milk and salt in heavy
saucepan. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla. Spread evenly in the pan. Walk
away. You can chill it for a couple of hours – I do not suggest cutting it until it is
quite cool and firm. Last year I jazzed it up with some rum-infused vanilla, and
our true blue letter carrier, Ron, mentioned especially how much he had enjoyed
this year’s batch. So you can probably experiment a little bit with other liqueur
flavors.
Our friends at https://www.food52.com have a recipe for Millionaire’s Shortbread which sounds divine. Best Beloved and the Tall One spent some time gamboling around the hiking paths of Scotland this summer, and developed a predilection for Scottish shortbread. Wait until they try home-baked, with generous lashings of chocolate and caramel.
https://food52.com/recipes/6932_millionnaires_shortbread
My mother never uses cake mixes; they offend her New England sensibilities. She would never even consider Ghiradelli Double Chocolate Brownie Mix, although I can assure you, it is a very fine product; many a box has migrated through our kitchen. When I was growing up my mother baked brownies made from scratch, and they were equally delish. These were from my grandmother’s secret family recipe, written down on a faded and thumb-printed index card. It was a family treasure, kept in a little wooden box in the pantry. A secret family recipe? Ha! Like most family secrets this was life-altering in its cunning and simple deceit – our Secret Family Recipe was pretty much verbatim the recipe on the back of the Baker’s Secret Chocolate box! Except that we left out the nuts.
Helen Foley’s Secret Family Brownie Recipe
4 squares Baker’s unsweetened chocolate
3/4 cup butter or margarine
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
Heat oven to 350°F.
Line 9” x 9 pan with parchment paper.
Bake 30 to 35 min. or until toothpick inserted in center comes out with fudgy crumbs. (Do not over bake.) Cool completely.
https://www.kraftrecipes.com/recipes/bakers-one-bowl-brownies-54515.aspx
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because
the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.
Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
-Roald Dahl
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