Buffalo Sponge Candy

It's Christmas candy time! Every year I try to make a new confection. One year it was peppermint patties. Another year it was a brandy-soaked fruitcake. Five years in a row it has been homemade marshmallows, which I still haven't been arsed to do. It's not a perfect tradition. This year I decided to make Buffalo Sponge Candy, using this recipe I found on Pinterest - my go-to source for inspiration, consternation, and disappointment. This stuff is like Violet Crumble or Crunchie bars; a light honeycomb dipped in chocolate. YUM. Can it be done in Hawaii? The land where candy sweats and dissolves and gets slogged away by ants before you can get back to the table with your hot cocoa? Let's find out, I said! I knew, people. I knew. So this candy is pretty simple: sugar, corn syrup, an infinitesimal amount of gelatin to bind the bubbles, and baking powder to make it explode. Also "very good" chocolate, for dipping in afterward. (Actually, looking back at the recipe, it doesn't say this at all, but "very good" was what I was chanting in my head while tossing aside bags of generic chocolate chips at the grocery store. It's a safe enough rule to live by, very good chocolate.)

 

1/2 tsp gelatin (bloomed in 1 tsp of water and reheated to liquid just before adding)

1 ½ cups sugar

½ cups corn syrup (light or dark or medium or whatever you have)

½ cup water

1 tbsp baking soda (sifted)

We had to make sure the chocolate was very good, first. Sometimes they poison these things, you know. My kids all know the "just to make sure it's not poisoned" sampling procedure we perform when opening anything made with chocolate.

So you boil up the sugars with a bit of water to 300 degrees. I don't have a candy thermometer, but I have made and ruined enough candy over the years to know all the stages of sugar. Boil it to hard crack, testing with a bowl of cold water every half a minute or so. You'll know because it stops balling up and becomes long threads of hard candy when it drips in the water. Don't stick your fingers in it or lick the spoon. It's 300 fucking degrees.

Then you mix in your bloom'd gelatin and whip in the baking soda and pour the thing out while it's very foamy and alarming. Yell, "10 points to Hufflepuff!" because you know this is really a Hufflepuff kind of thing.

I got a bit sidetracked at this point, because something on my counter smelled like a rotting corpse. I sniffed it down to the gelatin dish. Turns out that just because it's made of boiled horse's knees, gelatin smells like boiled horse's knees.

Tip: follow the directions and use baking parchment, or you'll be chipping this shit out of your pan with a knife later, and then chipping bits of Pyrex out of your candy when that goes wrong.

Let it cool for a few hours. Spend this time chasing cats out of your tree. 

I finally put the dish in the fridge, after determining that it was just going to sit and sweat if I left it out on the table, assuming the ants didn't find it first. Which they would, because they had formed squirmy black sweaters of themselves all over the drips I had gotten on the floor, and I murdered them with a sponge.

It sweated in the fridge anyway. When I broke pieces off, the inside had the right crumbly texture, but by the time you got it in your mouth it was already moist enough to glue your jaw shut when you bit down on it. I pried candy out of my fillings and then dumped rice in the bag, hoping to soak up the moisture and dry it out a bit. This is a trick that works with salt. If you visit Hawaii and discover restaurant salt shakers full of rice, this is why. That "when it rains it pours" girl on the Morton carton LIES.

So of course, the rice glued itself all over the candy.

Well, shit.

I got the chocolate out anyway.

And just ate it.

Ew. This picture is kind of lewd. I'm sorry. That is how it happened. MOM STAYS IN THE PICTURE.

So now I have a brick of candy covered in rice sitting in the fridge, because I remain naively optimistic that it'll still dry out and I can just flick the rice off and break the stuff up to dip in chocolate. I'm wondering if I could combat the humidity by boiling the candy just a bit longer and omitting the gelatin, which in my mind could be responsible for the bit of chewiness where I want a bit of crumbliness. For all the money I'm going to waste on this endeavor, I could have just bought half a dozen Violet Crumble bars, but that is beside the point. It's the doing of the thing. It's the thrill of the endeavor. It's the conquest and the victory dance and the remorse of eating it afterward. It's the staying off of Facebook and not arguing with redneck uncle about news articles.

Opt for adventure, folks. And go make this candy, because it's really easy and fun, actually - if you live ANYWHERE drier than the mid-Pacific.

Edit: YOU GUYS IT WORKED. I chipped the thing up and dipped the things in melted chocolate and at first it all softened into toffee, so I chucked it in the fridge and the chocolate did some kind of alchemy and IT SOLIDIFIED INTO CRUNCHIE NUGGETS.

I am so impressed. Naive optimism ftw!

the big Thanksgiving weekend

FAMILY PHOTOS. I forgot to take any. But I did take eight pictures of the turkey. I was hungry.

FAMILY DRAMA. My 13 year-old cousin threw himself down sobbing because we told him to stop laying across the floor like a slug and tripping everyone, then he built a pillow fort around himself because WHY NOT EVERYONE HATES ME ANYWAY YOU SHOULD ALL BE HAPPY NOW NOT TO HAVE TO LOOK AT ME. And because he is my cousin and not my precious nephew or beloved grandchild, I threw all the pillows off him and told him to stop being an asshole. "DRAINS AND RADIATORS," I yelled tenderly. "People will like you if you radiate good feels, and they will not like you if you drain all the good feels from the room." Yes, I said 'feels'. I had had a glass of wine. "BUT," I hollered on, "People will also immediately forgive people for being assholes if they just take a minute to think about it and then turn it around. TURN IT AROUND." He turned around and faced the wall and sobbed loudly. I made sucking noises like a drain. Gavin and I put on a podcast and laid around playing with Zenny until the sniffling stopped and the teenager came oozing quietly across the floor to listen with us. Someone made a dingledong joke and we all burst out laughing. The rest of the evening went pretty well, with pie and tea and dingledong joke reenactments. "I turned it around," cousinface quietly told me as we packed up to leave, and I was stunned that someone had actually listened to something I had been yelling. Leif just lets his eyes go unfocused while I try to pop my own head with my internal barometer.

TWO MORE PAYCHECKS TO CHRISTMAS OH NO. We set up the tree as soon as Thanksgiving was packed away in tupperware. It was a fake tree, but it was pre-lit, which turned out to be important because we forgot to pack any lights when we moved. Also missing: almost all our ornaments. And our stockings are somewhere at my mother's house. BUT WE HAVE A TREE UP. And there are cats in it, so that's kind of like ornaments. The first door on the advent calendar is open, the man baked coconut macaroons, I made lychee liqueor out of the fruit we've been soaking in gin since July, and in general we are panicking and flailing around, trying to pull off the holidays on a shoestring. I was going to make a fruitcake again, but it is a month's worth of work for something the kids won't eat anyway, so we decided just to drink the bottle of brandy and make a plum pudding instead. That is time/booze economics.

Next: "sponge candy". With pictures. And hopefully no fire extinguisher, because we don't have one.

36 in pictures

We tried to get a proper picture of me to document the aging process going on here. I have the fine-photography modeling skills of a lemur, and the man has a knack for taking pictures of people blinking, so these are the best we got.

Look down. To the side. That's no good. Smile. TOO MUCH. Whatever, good enough. *click*

What I actually look like most of the time. 

The year my last baby was a baby for the last time. 2.5 going on 12.

What I look like the rest of the time. 

More on Thanksgiving in a bit.

hunger and games

When the stores are full of cardboard cutouts of grinning turkeys in Pilgrim hats and shoppers are flinging coupons for free birds at haggard cashiers, you will know it is time for my birthday. This year my birthday falls on Turkey Day itself (appropriate), and so the annual birthday beer-and-a-movie date with husbandface was shoved up to Monday. The rule is that we have to lunch at a place within staggering distance of the theater, so this year we found ourselves at a place called BUFFALO WILD WINGS. Which sounded like a chicken wing place, but turned out to be a sports arena with sad-eyed teenagers dressed as referees guiding us along dotted yellow lines to a table surrounded by enormous blaring televisions tuned to sports channels. The effect was that of being seated in a Colosseum and not knowing from which direction the gladiators would be set upon you with short swords. As we tried to work out the scoring system on the menu, a group of military guys leaped up, cheering.

"Someone scored a goal," Mike said, goggling around at all the different games on the walls. 

"It was that one," I said, pointing over his shoulder. 

"That is Nascar."

"Yes, but while you were turned around, I took your beer."

"Ahhh, you scored the goal."

"Ten points to Griffindor!"

He took his beer back.

Consoled self with a Kona Longboard.

We gnawed chicken and talked trash and skipped to the theater afterwards. I took a picture in the bathroom, because I always do. And because it is always empty, which is kind of weird.

The last Hunger Games movie was just fine - maybe because I read the book 5 years ago and couldn't remember the damn thing at all. There was no blood, which is fine, because book-gore and movie-gore don't sit in the psyche the same way and I am a bit of a weenie.

We ran into Walmart on the way home, and plunged into a crowd of holiday shoppers yelling, "PATTI. WHERE THE PIES, PATTI?" There were no pies. There were only desperate mothers with visiting relatives trailing after them, shoving baking ingredients into their carts and sneaking pre-made mixes in while their mothers-in-law examined bags of Kona coffee. We did likewise, got in a fight with the self-checkout machine, and made it home in time to pick up the kids. VICTORY.

And that's that for another year. After four years of watching Jennifer Lawrence shoot things with flaming arrows on my birthday, I'll be adrift in a sea of cinematic woe next year. Throwing my vote in for an adaptation of Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series. GET FILMING, HOLLYWOOD. 

balls.

I can knit celtic knots and shetland lace, but I can't knit around a fucking foam ball.

Oh, hey, that looks alri-

#@%!?

HOLIDAY SPIRIT SURGING.

This is the holiday spirit that runs people down for spots in mall parking lots and throttles old ladies over 75% off snuggies. 

My mother shoved a box of lights in my hand and told me to get festive, so I hung them over the window just in time for the winter rain to arrive. Suddenly we are huddling under couch blankets with tea and breaking into choruses of Silent Night and watching crap holiday specials on youtube. 

And furtively reading Dean Koontz novels

It's working, folks. I had feelings.

In other news:

Went to storytime workshop and am now MASTER OF COLORED SCARVES. And I learned these action rhymes, which my kid will not let me stop doing. Will need both knees replaced by the end of the week:

I'm popcorn in a pan (crouch down)
Don't forget the top (pretend to put a lid on your head)
Soon I'll start to sizzle... (sizzle sizzle sizzle with your wiggly bum)
And then... I'll... POP! (JUMP UP OH MY GOD MY KNEES) 

Then when you can't take it anymore, you sit down and distract them with this one:

Pour the popcorn in the pan (rock your kid back and forth on your lap)
Shake it up, shake it up! (jostle poor helpless child)
BAM BAM BAM (bop up and down mercilessly)

Bonus: counts as exercise. Go get a mini snickers bar out of the secret pilfered Halloween stash.

annual holiday pep talk. DO THE THING.

It is very nearly inevitable that, eventually, life will crap on your sense of holiday magic. I'm lucky to have made it all the way to adulthood before a spectacularly awful Christmas with the in-laws dropped that particular heap of shit on my warm-fuzzies back in 2003. Maybe some people manage to nurture the fragile blossom of wonder deep into their lives and then conveniently die before any grim life event can slap it from their hearts, but then they've gone and snuffed the joy for everyone else who loved them dearly, so GOOD JOB.

Adulthood renders toy companions into lumps of plastic and fairy lights into electric bills, and you learn pretty quickly that if the holidays are to have any chance of surviving to the next generation, you have to fight back. It won't mean you'll feel the thing again, but it's better than being a miserable old asshole.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT, I tell myself every year. And it's worked, because my kids dance with excitement and tell stories about magical Christmases Past that I can barely recognize from where I'm standing with my oven mitts tugged on like boxing gloves. There were divorces and deaths and layoffs and illnesses that I've had to run ahead and kick out of the way and bury under tinsel and drown in eggnog, flicking cookies like ninja stars  - and IT WORKED. The kids are whole and shiny. These are the good old days, this is the payoff, and I will take it and eat it and wash it down with hot buttered rum, because this is the point of the whole thing. Existence is too big and important and incredible to get run flat by grubby human bullshit. You get to be here, to be part of it. Make that shit happen. Grab it and throttle some joy out of it even if that joy is real instead of magical. So nobody stuffs my stocking or remembers to buy me Santa presents? I will cram a whole bottle of St. Germain's into that sock and buy myself all the yarn I want and knit while swigging booze at 6am on Christmas, and SO THERE. That is how you do this thing.

This year we vaulted a cancer diagnosis ('pre-cancer'? I win for another year!). We skidded around animal heartbreak (Xebo died, but he was 20 years old and OH LOOK WE FOUND A KITTEN). We avoided hospital visits (caught the toddler's head with my goddamn FOOT on two occasions). You can't dodge everything - my mother lost an internal organ, the childcare budget flared up and consumed the grocery budget, and last night I broke the cartilage in my nose when I accidentally headbutted a flying cat - but WE FIGHT.

6 weeks left. Get to it.

Figgy

Figs are kind of moist and pink and a bit uncomfortable to paint the insides of.

Ooer. And gross.

Up on the produce portraiture wall it goes. I'm going to fill it stove-to-ceiling. And across the doorway. And all around the kitchen, until I run out of produce and start drawing cans of corn and jars of olives and granola bars with little hats on. My grandchildren will shake their heads and point and say, "That's about where grannie went mad, there amongst the individual noodles." And I'll hit them with my cane and yell about the relevance of cultural preservation through art. "WE WOULDN'T KNOW WHAT WATERMELON LOOKED LIKE IF IT WEREN'T FOR GIOVANNI STANCHI."

It's all worked out.

Halloween 2015: wrath of the elf

POSTERITY POST.

What a festive disaster.

Firstly, I was hungover. Not with booze, but with panic over the idea that it might have been booze. Any time I have a couple of light beers and go to bed mildly tipsy I wake in a panic the entire night, heart slamming because WHAT IF I'M AN ALCOHOLIC AND WHAT IF I HAVE A HEART ATTACK OR MY LIVER FAILS IN MY SLEEP AND I DIE. So I was in a state of acute remorse and trembling exhaustion by the time I made it to my mom's house after work for Halloween festivities. The kids were carving pumpkins and the adults were sipping margaritas, and the moment I made a face and waved off a drink I was pushed out the door with $20 in my hand and orders to return with hamburgers. Halloween is not a night for cooking or for nutrition. I did this thing.

Things began to derail as costumes were donned. Through an accident in sizing on Amazon, both the boys had the same Legolas costume. They weren't going as Lord of the Rings characters, but as Dungeons and Dragons characters, which are close enough. Gavin had a big stick, which cousin Chris contested hotly because that was for his D&D character, despite the fact that he was dressed as a doctor and didn't need a big damn stick anyway.

And then Chris ran away to find his friends from the high school who lived in the neighborhood. Gavin, who has trick-or-treated with his cousin/best friend every year since their very BIRTHS, slowly puffed up into a ball of hackles like a supremely cheesed off mountain lion.  "Chill," I said to him as I was wrestling Zenny into her dragon pants, "We will find him when we head out. He'll probably bring his friends back with him."

Heading out was delayed, because it was immediately apparent that Zenny's costume would kill her. It was roughly 140 degrees with the humidity, and she was damp with sweat by the time I finished chasing her around with the camera.

We tossed the dragon fleece aside and I cut up a paper bag while my mother put motorcycle-repair aluminum tape on a McDonalds cup for a crown. THE PAPER BAG PRINCESS, we crowed.

"Ronald, you're a bum," she said. I was so proud.

I didn't dress up. I tried on my mom's valkyrie helmet and a couple witch hats before just wearing a black dress.

My mother, on the other hand, made her own Doctor Horrible costume and freeze ray. I should have slapped a hammer sticker on a t shirt, damn it.

The younger cousin was a ghoul. Again. His only criteria in a costume is that it covers his face. Which doesn't do any good when he keeps running up to people and hauling it up and yelling, "LAST YEAR WAS MUCH SCARIER THAN THIS YEAR. I CAN'T EAT PEANUTS."

The students at the college made pumpkins, and then the staff (my aunt and husband) stole them. So we had rather a lot of jack-o-lanterns to greet the candy-seekers.

Gavin was ready to go. He had murderous rage in his eyes. But he's a pretty nice guy, so it looked like this:

I KILL YOU, CHRIS

We headed out just as the sun set, so this was the last lit picture I took. The elf stalked along, stamping his stick angrily, while the paper bag ran to keep up with him.

We found the cousin. The enormous high school friends turned to stare at us self-consciously, adjusting their hats, so I gave them a moment. The boy came back fuming, and the cousin set off with his crew of future internet trolls, too cool to hang out with his oldest and most loyal friend. And just like that, childhood Halloweens ended for the both of them. Turning 13 is rough. 

We did the rounds with the littler kids, got back to the house for the candy dump, watched a spooky show, and carried sleeping bodies to the car at 10pm. 

And that was that. Success, and pain, and soon... VENGEANCE.

flashers and sharks

Both of our library-frequenting police officers came in yesterday, looking bushy-tailed. They only travel in packs when they're on a call.

officer 1: someone reported a blonde lady flashing traffic by the library. Anybody seen her?
everyone: *turn to look at blonde librarian*
me: Hey. I've been at the desk all morning.
co-worker: What did she look like - how old was she?
officer 2: We don't know. Depends if she was going like this [up high] or like this [down low].
co-worker: *smacks officer's arm*
officer 2: we had a call about a shark earlier, want to see?
me: ooh, sure.
officer 2: *shows picture of mutilated leg chomped into hamburger by shark*
me: MY EYES. WHY.

Never a dull day.

self-actualization and potties

In my dream, I was dead. I was laying dead in a ditch and trying to get a flattering selfie of my dead self so I could update my facebook profile and see if people I hadn't heard from in a while might want to reconnect before I lost sentience completely. Which I was failing to do, because I was dead, and I couldn't get my arms to work. I woke up with my head hanging off the mattress.

If I'm thinking accidental death might be an expedient way to make friends, it might be a sign that I need more people in my life.

This is all Ann Brashares' fault. I stayed up until 11pm finishing the book, then went to bed like a hollow-eyed sad thing.

The lost love returns after 10 years and their someday arrives. The 'successful one' puts down her phone and finds her own voice again. The wayward girl hits bottom and then blossoms in the sunshine with a baby in her arms. Everyone reconnects, laughs and hugs and eats pop tarts, and it's all ok in the end.

Damn it, I want to feel things. And laugh about things outside of the letters h-a-h-a on my keyboard. And find letters in my mailbox. Maybe I'd get some if I sent some damn letters to people. 

Off to find a book that is more thrills-and-kilts and less weep-for-your-squandered-life.

In other news

* I missed Rhinebeck, the big upstate New York fiber festival. Again. Someone please help me come up with a reason to go to that thing without having to visit my in-laws.

* Looking at artwork on my blog feed (here, here, oh, and here) I felt existential distress because I haven't been making art - and then remembered that I've been spending all my free time drawing a potty-training board book. This is going to be my legacy. In a world of portraiture and fantasy art and stormy landscapes, I have a half-finished potty board book. And folks, I have discovered why there are not more potty books. Why there is an ever-present need for potty-training instruction and an inexplicable dearth of material. Why illustrators go through ridiculous back-flips to avoid drawing kids on potties (eg: "I'm a Potty Superhero!" with child in cape not actually using a potty. You know who does not know what a 'superhero' is? MY POTTY TRAINING TODDLER). Because here is what happens when you try to make a potty book:

1. After sketching the book out and beginning the process of gathering reference for the final illustrations, you discover almost immediately that it is REALLY creepy taking pictures of toddlers using the toilet, and you begin wondering how you'd explain it to a judge after the police ram down your door. I happen to have a toddler on hand. Imagine needing to borrow your friend's kid for pictures in the bathroom. NOPE. 
2. In an effort to avoid taking reference pictures, you turn to the internet - figuring there are plenty of proud parents posting tasteless pictures of their kids on the potty - and immediately you are punched in the face by horrifying pictures of bottle-sucking men in diapers and bonnets spreading their legs suggestively.
3. You set the computer on fire and go draw a book about ducklings.

I decided to just take pictures of my kid watching tv on the ottoman and pretend it was a potty, and that was fine. But then I had the great idea to include a bit about using a public toilet - because really, half of potty training is running across a giant store with the kid under your arm and crouching in the stall to hold them up on the toilet. So the next time we found ourselves sprinting to the Costco restroom, I helped her finish her business and then remembered to take a picture of the public toilet for reference. Just the toilet. On its own. "STOP TAKING PICTURES," my kid bellowed, and I felt the laser eyes of every person in the crowded bathroom shoot through the stall door into my back. "IT JUST FELL OUT OF MY PURSE," I lied loudly, cramming my phone away. Then I whipped her through the hand-washing trough and we ran for it.

I had better produce the next Once Upon a Potty for all this nonsense, I tell you what.