Santa's Kitchen

With Thanksgiving behind us and Christmas rapidly approaching, Phineas and I are in the planning and testing phase of Christmas cooking. We have two major cooking projects coming up. One is our annual Christmas Eve seafood dinner with my family, which (long story) we are doing on the 20th. More on this in other posts. The other, and the one I am going to blog about today, is a project I like to think of as Santa's Kitchen.

Santa's Kitchen started innocently enough with a recipe for homemade chocolate truffles. After the first time Phineas and I made them, demand grew and they became an annual project. Last year, stumped for gift ideas for a few people, I decided that a box of handmade candy would be a thoughtful way to go. So we made extra truffles and I also tried my hand at peanut brittle. It was tricky, but, after several pounds of nuts and sugar, I finally made a successful batch around attempt #5.

Anyway, this year we decided to expand our list of recipients (if you are reading this, you stand a good chance of being "on the nice list" and if you are worried, you are free to petition or bribe us, whichever approach suits your personality and you think we will fall for). We also decided to ambitiously expand the offerings. Here's what we plan to include:

• Chocolate Truffles
• Peanut Brittle
• Caramels
  
• Phineas' Limoncello
• Spiced Nuts
• Peppermint Bark

Despite all my recent posts about Lyle's, I don't really get to play with hot sugar too often. So, I am really excited. Anyway, tomorrow we are going to take a first stab at some of these recipes. Hopefully I will have good news to report. But if it is anything like the peanut brittle, this may be a long series of posts!