return of the christmas goodies

at no point, thankfully, did anybody cook like thisIt's been a funny old day...

Both from the perspective of the weather (although I'm reasonable sure that it was almost exactly the same as a year ago today... grey, rainy, cool and much more suited to Autumn than Summer) and partly because Ma seemed a little more forgetful than usual.

And even though she'd made lists of everything she needed, and supposedly got everything, I still ended up having to make two separate runs to two different supermarkets...

She also seemed more scattered than I remember from last year... although I think I had more stuff organised for her last year as well so all she was essentially doing was mixing wet and dry ingredients.

We also nearly screwed up one of the recipes... partly because she didn't seem to know which side of the page she was working from, and partly because I thought she was working on the opposite one from the one she actually was and dumped walnuts in the wrong bowl.

And we tried something new... a Lemon, Lime and Coconut Truffle... it never really set properly though (stupid white chocolate) in it's official form, so we just added some coconut to the mix (and really, why not... just about everything else has coconut in it) rather than rolling it in coconut, and then used rainbow sprinkles on the outside which made a nice, colourful, change.

At one point though I did kinda want to throw in the towel on even trying to make it into truffles and just spread the mixture on thick, crusty bread. It smelled and tasted really good... kind of a Lemon Butter vibe!

The other thing that we did differently this year was that we "salted" half of the Sherry Truffles... inspired by the boys from Burger Theory and their amazing salted chocolate cookies, we went with a sprinkling of salt flakes instead of Ma's usual chocolate spirals. So we'll see what the reaction to those are.

I also spent most of the day Instagramming our progress (mostly towards the end as we finished off things) which was fun.

Less fun was the fact that I washed and/or dried bowls, spoons, dishes... not to mention the food processor... all damn day.

I'm going to have to do something different as far as who gets what at work from now on though... about half of what we produce ends up being for The Nut House... and while I don't really object to doing it, it's more that there are people I wouldn't bother doing it for if I didn't "have to". It comes out to about 130 balls for everyone... and that's not even counting the Rocky Road, the Ham Hearts or the Mince Tarts.

And it was, once again, a 12 hour day from the time I got there to the time I left, so I'm more than a little knackered at present... and I'm sure I'll be stiff in all the wrong places when I wake up tomorrow.

For all of that though, I am pleased with the results...

rocky road, rum balls, peppermint ice balls, chocolate balls, chocolate puddings, salted sherry truffles, hazelnut delights, lemon lime truffles, brandy apricot truffles
Portrait of Christmas goodies as a three by three grid, 2011

So... much... chocolate...

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