Sticky Traditions

Well it is that time of year again and I don't just mean the Holidays I mean Chocolate making time.
As most of you know my family has a very long (i can not remember a time during my life when it was not part of the Holiday season) tradition of getting together between Christmas and Thanksgiving and making homemade chocolates and pecan logs.
This is a very long and involved process. I did not even realize how involved until I moved away and was not able to make them with the family anymore. That is when I found how how much I did not know about the chocolate making. I had my Mom come up to Washington to help me make only a few flavors and teach me how to make the fondant (that is the yummy cream in the middle). It is a lot more work to make them when you do not have a whole crew of people.
We started phase one yesterday.
Phase one is making all of the fondant and putting in the flavors. This is actually the first year that I remembered to bring my camera.
This is a picture of two of my aunts getting ready to start cooking.
We usually have 4-5 pots holding double batches of fondant going at once.


These are the marble slabs that we pour the very hot candy on to cool so that we can turn them with the spatulas until they turn to cream. We had five of them laid out over my sister Roni's counter and kitchen table.






This is the fondant after it has started to turn to cream. After this we put it into bowls and add the flavoring.
We did 11 double batches of fondant. We made them into raspberry, maple walnut, vanilla, orange, lemon, rum and butter, and butter pecan. We will also dip cherries, caramel, and olympian cream in the chocolate. We also do raisin and peanut clusters.
Monday (25th of Nov.) we started at 9:00 with my Mom, Dad, Roni, two of my aunts, one of my cousins, and me and we finished with the clean up at 2:00.
We will start the dipping on Saturday.