Dec 16
2008
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The peanut brittle was by far the easiest; I don't know why I've never tried it before. Melt two cups of sugar in a heavy pan stirring constantly. I used my cast iron fry pan but something with higher sides would be a little safer and less spill prone. Add one cup of shelled roasted peanuts and pour the whole thing onto a rimmed cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil (for easy clean up and because my sheet was open on one end). Break it into piece once it's cool. It's really yummy but gets stuck in your teeth.
Rob's sister came over to meet Abby in the afternoon. She's been away since June and it was nice to see her again. Abby was (somehow) on her best behaviour and did a minimum of jumping around crazily. Carolyn brought over some vinegar so we could try making sponge toffee. This was the only candy I made that involved the thermometer and, therefore, the most intimidating. We managed to get to the right temperature and not beyond though and added the baking soda to make everything foam up. It look pretty cool but apparently requires a very specific amount of stirring: enough to mix all of the soda into all of the syrup but not enough to deflate the foam. I erred on the side of caution and our candy is more like a thin layer of sponge on top of some clear vinegar flavoured candy. Interesting flavour. Rob says we should try again while we've still got the vinegar.

Sunday was the day we had set aside to drive around and look at Christmas lights. We were both ridiculously excited to be doing this in our new car; it warms up so nicely and the windows don't frost over (doing this in our old car involved stopping after a little while and scraping off the insides of all the windows so we could see again). Our light-viewing tradition involves going to the convenience store and getting weird hot milky drinks (mine was "two bite brownie" and Rob's was "cinnamon sticky bun") and hot dogs (last year there were hot dogs but no buns - so disappointing). We drove all over one of the neighbourhoods and even managed to pick up a little local radio station (range is only about 2 Km) playing all sorts of cool Christmas music.
