I took a moment this morning to appreciate the beauty and wonder of nature.
And then I got down to the beauty and wonder of sweeping/shoveling paths to lessen the chance that the resident elderly people and delivery drivers will break their necks.
(The latter if my street ever gets plowed. We are very rural and low in the priorities of our fuck-public-services government. I’m perfectly happy if someone declines to risk their life to deliver office supplies to my door within an algorithmically scheduled delivery window.)
The only interesting “cooking” I’ve done recently is in the candy department.
My mother bought huge bags of dark chocolate and “white vanilla flavored” melting wafers for candy-making purposes. She makes what’s basically really stiff frosting out of butter, powdered sugar, and whatever flavored extract she’s in the mood for, shapes it into balls, and covers them in chocolate.
Since I’m not a frosting fan, I go in a different direction. This week’s experiments were all about coconut.
The dark ones are filled with coconut and extra-reduced homemade sweetened condensed milk so I could skip using powdered sugar as a thickening agent. Love the taste, but I’m a texture queen, so I’d like to include some toasted coconut or chopped nuts (or both) next time for crunch. I’m still figuring out the dipping tool, so those look a little bit messy.
The pale ones are a lot messy because a) my aforementioned dipping tool ineptitude and b) those “white vanilla flavored” disks are super runny. Although I appreciate that they make an extremely thin coating because they’re nauseatingly sweet, the consistency does cause some problems with both puddling and cracking. I slopped more coating over the top of some of the cracks in a futile attempt to prevent more filling extrusion, with monstrous aesthetic results.
Appearances aside, these taste amazing. They’re a knockoff of Fannie May (not to be confused with Fannie Mae) Trinidads, which have a soft fudge center and a pastel coating (AKA “white vanilla flavored”) lightly studded with toasted coconut. Several years ago, I tried a recipe for hot fudge and wrote on the recipe “way too thick—probably good truffle filling.” I was not wrong. I’d tweak it a teeny bit, but everybody else was cuckoo bananas about these as-is.
I did have a bit of dazzling foresight. I rolled the filling balls in toasted coconut, pressed it in really firmly, and popped them in the freezer until I was ready to dip. Yes, extra toasted coconut crunch and flavor, but the main idea was to put a barrier between the fudge and the warm “white vanilla flavored” bath so the fudge didn’t melt on contact and make the pool of coating muddy. Worked like a charm.
I haven’t touched a crochet hook in a while. I can watch a movie and crochet or do DIY speech therapy, but there’s no time for both. The purely recreational thing, therefore, is on hiatus.
I’ve resolved not to discuss the speech therapy until I’ve made some discernible progress. Since I’m beginning from a state of advanced atrophy and I’ve been working on it for *checks calendar* six days, you’ll be spared for a long while.
