House of Wax (Paper)
Today we made candy. If you know my family, you probably know what kind of candy I mean. It's white chocolate and peppermint chunks. Some people call it brittle. Some people call it bark. Most people just get anxious when it's two days before Christmas and why hasn't Mark given me my candy yet? Did I upset him? Am I not getting it this year? Maybe I should send them a gift basket.
When I was in high school I helped my mother make it. It was usually a three-day project because we gave it to just about everyone. All the family. All dad's coworkers. Everyone at the bank. Teachers, friends, faux neighbors, firefighters, bus drivers, postal carriers, and dentists. It was a lot of chocolate.
Then two semi-related things happened. I went to college and my family was in a car accident. By accident I mean they were hit by a middle-aged woman who was so drunk on a Sunday afternoon that she continued to try to drive her Honda after it had totaled my family's four-ton Ford Excursion and flipped onto its side. My dad and younger brother were both largely unhurt, just cut and bruised pretty badly. Nich was also banged up and developed OCD, something that is relatively common for people with Down syndrome who experience a trauma. My mother shattered four discs in her spine and continues to have back pain.
It's been a strange re-adjustment period, and one of the things that had to be re-worked was the candy. The amount of candy she made has slowly decreased, and last year there was no candy. I don't even like the stuff and it didn't feel like Christmas. So this year when she mentioned making it again I tried to remember how. And spent an afternoon cutting wax paper into 2-foot pieces, cutting a third of those in half and then taping the half-sheets to the whole ones.
Wax paper is vital to the candy, see, because it keeps it from sticking to the pan. Wax paper is one of the only things chocolate won't stick to. Unlike the microwave, the sink, the floor, the counters, the drawer faces and my clothes, wax paper peels right off the chocolate. So once I had our magic paper bases finished, which I managed this week, we were ready to knock out some candy. By some I mean all. By all I mean 180 pounds of molten chocolate. It sounds fun, but it gets sickening pretty fast. There is such a thing as too much chocolate, and I can tell you that it's somewhere in between a milky-way bar and 180 pounds of white chocolate wafers.
But you can rest assured that Christmas is coming this year. It's already in my kitchen, in large thirty-pound boxes. Now all we have to do is scrub all the drippings off the kitchen floor. Oh boy. Did I mention I can't wait to move out?
When I was in high school I helped my mother make it. It was usually a three-day project because we gave it to just about everyone. All the family. All dad's coworkers. Everyone at the bank. Teachers, friends, faux neighbors, firefighters, bus drivers, postal carriers, and dentists. It was a lot of chocolate.
Then two semi-related things happened. I went to college and my family was in a car accident. By accident I mean they were hit by a middle-aged woman who was so drunk on a Sunday afternoon that she continued to try to drive her Honda after it had totaled my family's four-ton Ford Excursion and flipped onto its side. My dad and younger brother were both largely unhurt, just cut and bruised pretty badly. Nich was also banged up and developed OCD, something that is relatively common for people with Down syndrome who experience a trauma. My mother shattered four discs in her spine and continues to have back pain.
It's been a strange re-adjustment period, and one of the things that had to be re-worked was the candy. The amount of candy she made has slowly decreased, and last year there was no candy. I don't even like the stuff and it didn't feel like Christmas. So this year when she mentioned making it again I tried to remember how. And spent an afternoon cutting wax paper into 2-foot pieces, cutting a third of those in half and then taping the half-sheets to the whole ones.
Wax paper is vital to the candy, see, because it keeps it from sticking to the pan. Wax paper is one of the only things chocolate won't stick to. Unlike the microwave, the sink, the floor, the counters, the drawer faces and my clothes, wax paper peels right off the chocolate. So once I had our magic paper bases finished, which I managed this week, we were ready to knock out some candy. By some I mean all. By all I mean 180 pounds of molten chocolate. It sounds fun, but it gets sickening pretty fast. There is such a thing as too much chocolate, and I can tell you that it's somewhere in between a milky-way bar and 180 pounds of white chocolate wafers.
But you can rest assured that Christmas is coming this year. It's already in my kitchen, in large thirty-pound boxes. Now all we have to do is scrub all the drippings off the kitchen floor. Oh boy. Did I mention I can't wait to move out?
posted by Erin @ 11:57 PM
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