Spiced Nuts

I know I said I would get the recipe for the spiced nuts up yesterday but people, yesterday was a madhouse. The evening commute took over an hour last night and I had to stop at Target on the way home for kitty litter. WHAT was I thinking? I was seriously tempted to start swing that 25 lb. box of litter. And I (successfully, thank god) battled the urge to grab this one guy's keys and park his damn car for him. Gah!

Memo for next year—lay in a several month supply of kitty litter by mid-November.

When I finally got home I still needed to cook dinner and put some meat up in the freezer before it turned and wait for Scoob to go to bed so I could wrap his gifts. By then it was 2:00 am and I called it a day and went to bed.

Back up this morning bright and early for physical therapy and woke up with a cold sore and a seriously sore throat. I've still got too much to do to take time out for being sick, not to mention we're leaving for North Carolina in a few days. And I seriously don't want to be traveling while sickly—I'll be that awful person sitting behind you on the plane hacking, coughing, sneezing, and sniffing (did I miss a dwarf?) for 6 solid hours. Not to mention being a lousy house guest invading my hosts' home with my germs.

So anyhow, here are my nuts.

I know you can't really see my nuts here, but I was pretty darn pleased with the packaging.

Spiced Nuts

Ingredients

2 cups nuts (I used almonds)

Spice Mix:

2 Tbsps sugar

¾ tsp kosher salt

½ tsp cinnamon

⅛ tsp allspice

⅜–½ tsp cayenne pepper (to taste)

Glaze:

1 Tbsp water

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp brown sugar

1 Tbsp canola or corn oil

Directions

1. Heat the oven (or toaster oven) to 350°. Spread the nuts on a baking sheet and toast them for 6 minutes or until they are fragrant and their color deepens slightly.
2. In a medium-size bowl, stir together the spice mix.
3. In a saucepan, combine the glaze ingredients and bring them to a boil over medium heat, whisking constantly. Stir in the toasted nuts and continue to stir until all the nuts are shiny and the liquid is gone, about 1 to 2 minutes. Move the glazed nuts to a mixing bowl, sprinkle on the spice mix, and toss them well to coat.
4. Spread the coated nuts on a cookie sheet and return them to the oven for another 4 minutes; check regularly to make sure they don't burn. Remove and let cool. (If you try to taste test these before the nuts cool you'll experience chewy, soggy nuts and be tempted to throw them out.)

I've found I like this recipe more when I double the amount of nuts and triple the glaze and spice mix.

**I can't even work up the energy to feel even the slightest bit embarrassed about all the nut references—toasted nuts, shiny nuts, chewy nuts, soggy nuts. Go ahead, laugh at me while I'm down. I would except that laughing kicks off a chest rattling cough.

Peppermint Bark-y Patties

So we had the bake sale at work yesterday and we raised about $425 for the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Yay! Here's the thing that gets me about these bake sales—we're selling all this stuff to ourselves. Add to that all the treats being sent in by authors, agents, and even our website server host and I'm doomed. Like I seriously need any help padding my hips and arse.

And if the other people who brought things to sell are anything like me, they've got leftovers from what they made at home already and the last thing I need is to buy more sweets to bring home. I was seriously hoping we would be able to set up our table on the sidewalk outside our building. We're right on a high-end retail strip in Berkeley and I'm sure the sweets, not to mention the cause, would be well received. I'm not sure why we didn't though I'd wager money that permits and health codes factored into it.

Since I knew a bake sale would mean lots of breads/cakes/pies/cookies and the like, I tried to mix it up a bit and took spiced nuts and these Peppermint Bark-y Patties and I tried to package things so that they could be gifted. One co-worker told me she gave a package of nuts to her son's teacher and I thought that was awesome. I'll get the nuts recipes up tomorrow.






Instead of the irregular pieces that you usually get with peppermint bark, I decided to try making these little cups using a mini cupcake pan. I really like the way they turned out.

Peppermint Bark-y Patties

Ingredients

12 oz. bag semi-sweet chocolate chips

12 oz. bag of white chocolate chips

6 full-sized candy canes, crushed

Peppermint extract

Directions

1. Melt the white chocolate over indirect heat with a few drops of peppermint extract and spoon into the cupcake pan. You'll need to let the white chocolate set up before moving to the next step—10–15 minutes in the refrigerator should do it. (I learned this the hard way. Though Scoob was happy because he snacked on the rejects.)
2. While the white chocolate sets, unwrap the candy canes and place in a plastic zippy bag and crush. The smashing/crushing part was great for getting out some frustrations! Be sure to use the freezer-style zippy bags—the thicker the plastic the better, those candy cane shards are sharp and rip right through a regular zippy bag. (Another lesson learned the hard way. I had so much [sticky] candy cane dust on the counters I thought the Candy Cane Fairy had been here.)
3. Melt the semi-sweet chocolate over indirect heat and spoon into the cupcake pan, completely covering the white chocolate and spreading to the sides of the cups.
4. Before the semi-sweet chocolate sets, place the crushed candy canes in a sieve and shake the fine candy cane dust over the cupcake tray. Then place the larger pieces into the cups. You may need to press down a little so the chocolate gets a grip on the pieces.

I did 2 batches of these (24 patties per batch) and one thing I noticed while making them is that the semi-sweet chocolate melts to a thinner consistency than the white chocolate. So while a 12 oz. bag of white chocolate chips barely made it through 24 cups, I had extra semi-sweet chocolate. (What a crying shame, I tell you. Don't worry, no chocolate was wasted.) Oh, be sure to add the extract to the white chocolate and not the semi-sweet, otherwise the semi-sweet will seize and have a grainy texture. (Thankfully mom warned me about this before I started so I didn't have to learn that lesson the hard way.)

I turned the cupcake pan upside down on a sheet of waxed paper and a few taps on the back of the pan was enough to free the cups.