Marthaness

This year I vowed to simplify my gift-giving and to incorporate more home made treats.  I bought Martha Stewart’s Holiday Handmade Gifts magazine to help inspire and guide me to this end.  It is a treasure trove of beautiful photographs and great homemade gift ideas. 

One of the easier (ha!) ones is dipped peppermint sticks.  The idea is simple.  Take peppermint sticks, dip one end of the stick in melted white chocolate then dip in white nonpareils.  Package up in a clear cellophane bag with cute label.

I’m envisioning bestowing adorable gifts of dipped peppermint sticks and some gourmet hot chocolate to all my friends and family.

Right. 

So first off I can’t find plain old peppermint sticks – just candy canes.  Which would be fine if I could only find PEPPERMINT candy canes.  I’m finding garish green and pink and orange ones in various fruit flavors but no peppermint.  I ask Rick to stop on his way home from work and he picks up three boxes of lovely red and white striped canes only to realize once they are home they are strawberry flavor.  I wonder if Santa knows about this.

Finally I find regular old candy canes.  No joke – had to go to four different stores before I could find them.  My first batch of white chocolate chips seized up because I went a little too far in the heating up process.  I had already eaten almost half the bag so I don’t have a lot to work with in the first place.  I try again and manage to get the chocolate to the right consistency.  I dip the canes in the chocolate then in the sprinkles.  It is a huge drippy, lumpy mess and they look dreadful.  Nothing like Martha’s. 

So the first three are duds.  I finally work out a system of dipping, then wiping off most of the chocolate, then pouring the sprinkles on.  This seems to work a little better.  Still not the pristine results Martha shows in her magazine.

At this point I’m guessing Martha has minions doing all the work and they are actually using Elmer’s glue instead of melted chocolate in some kind of food staging trickery.

Seriously, if you have the magazine look at page 8.  There’s no way those babies are dipped in melted chocolate.  If you happen to get one of these packages from me it must mean I love you very much.  Because I’m not doing any more of them.

It’s on to Peppermint bark now.