It's been snowing again. Yesterday saw a couple of inches, and today another couple more. It's been the extremely light, fluffy kind.
The current Sunset magazine has a salted chocolate pecan toffee recipe. It seemed simple enough for even a newbie to candy making to follow, so I thought I would try it out. I thought the pecans were too expensive, and the Costco package was sold out. The next best thing was almonds. I thought they would make an acceptable replacement. There was no way I'd use walnuts. (I don't like them.) So yesterday I toasted the almonds and chopped them up. I measured the sugar and was about to start working with it when I started to read more of the recipe and discovered I'd need a candy thermometer. I also discovered we don't have one, or if we do, I don't know where it is. So I temporarily placed the toffee making on hold.
Last night, I spent a couple of hours creating a composite portrait out of two separate photos. One of our church families recently had their daughter get married. For some reason, the wedding pictures have not yet shown up. They really wanted a Christmas photo with the couple and their daughter, but there just wasn't one. They had photos from their camera and found two images that they thought might work. One was of the groom in outside, bright overcast conditions. The second was the bride and the groom's daughter sitting in the back seat of a car, taken with a flash and the yellowish dome light shining on the bride's hair.
I did a rough cut and paste to see if the composite could be composed in such a way to make it work reasonably well, and it fit surprisingly well together. So I spent the next couple of hours doing a finer cut of the bride and daughter and pasting them on top of the groom, blending the edges, adjusting the color tones, fixing the bride's hair color, matching the overall lighting intensity, etc.. The car seat was gray and so was the groom's tuxedo. That was fortunate because the bride's veil's background and the tuxedo more or less matched in color. At the start I wasn't too sure I could get it to work out, but in the end, I was happy with the result.
The photo story is actually connected with the toffee making story. When asked what I wanted in exchange for the photo work, I replied, "A candy thermometer." And so last night, I was lent one with a permanent one possibly following later.
Earlier today I went out to the church, on my bicycle, with studded tires, on the snow and ice. It's actually not that bad when the snow is fresh and there aren't too many ruts and berms.
Upon returning from the church I resumed the toffee making. I started the sugar and butter mixture in a what I thought was a large enough saucepan. Well, it wasn't. Once the mixture started to boil and froth, I quickly realized I needed a much larger pot. So quickly I transferred it to our largest pot. The problem now though was that the candy thermometer would no longer reach the mixture when it was clipped to the side of the pot. So, donning heavy rubber work gloves, I continued to stir the mixture while holding the thermometer in it.
The rest of the process went as the recipe said it should. I got the toffee poured into the baking sheet, then the chocolate on top of that, and then almonds and salt.
Once done and broken into pieces, I packaged about half of the toffee into a dozen little packages to be given out this Sabbath after church. The rest I am going to have to keep a close eye on and ration to the rest of my family. If left alone, they're going to disappear quite quickly, I'm afraid.
This evening, we hosted a Christmas party for the kids. We had a dozen girls, ranging in age from about 5 to 15. There was English Muffin pizzas, mozzarella fingers, and jalapeno poppers. They played a game of Christmas carol Pictionary, had some ice cream sundaes and banana splits, and then a game of Cranium. The evening concluded with a gift exchange.
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