Sprung At Last

It’s A Long Story: In The Very Beginning

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Mr. Faraway asks a question, and here is the answer: It’s a long story.

At the very, very beginning, my parents met. My Mother was 30 years old, one of four daughters of a not-well-off, unhappily married small-town Wisconsin couple. My Father was 22 years old, the only son of a not-well-off, unhappily married Jewish couple, who emigrated to South Africa from Latvia just ahead of the Holocaust that swept away the families they left behind.

They met on a kibbutz in Israel, where I was conceived, and then went to New York City, where I was born.

We were not well off, either, and the part of the marriage where we all lived together did not last long: By the time I was a year old, there were no more photographs of my father. By the age of 18 months, there are photos of me in Wisconsin, on my grandparents’ porch. There are a few photos of me in New York, and then they stop, and we are in Wisconsin again, at my grandparents’ house. I’m pretty sure we occupied the upstairs bedroom, though I have some memories of sleeping on a pull-out sofa. There were lots of cousins and aunts, and a dog that I played with, a miniature schnauzer with floppy, uncut ears.

There was a kitten, too, about whom I remember one thing: I decided to take her outside to get some air one day, and she got loose and climbed up a tree. I was told she ran away, and that may be true, but in any case I never saw her again.

 

Apple Cider Caramels

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We were all ready. We had a plan.

 

The Child wanted to give gifts to all her friends and all her teachers, which was fine when she was in elementary school and this meant one girl, one teacher, and one music teacher. Gift baskets and silly hats for everyone!

 

She’s in middle school now, and this means lists of teachers and coaches and friends and sort-of friends. We begin our discussion with a brief math test: Ten teachers times a $25 Starbucks card is how much?

 

We move on to budgeting, and from there simple division, and then to more advanced math problems: If it takes an hour to pick out one very personal gift for each of twelve friends, and you still have to do homework every evening, how much time is left to play Minecraft and watch Smosh videos?

 

Finally, we hit on a plan, and find assorted holiday rubber ducks for all her friends, and some inexpensive penguin mugs for the teachers, which will be delivered filled with homemade caramels. No problem. Christmas under control … until it isn’t, after a huge project at work keeps me late several nights, and a rather odd string of phone calls sucks up even more of my spare time.

 

Still, caramels aren’t hard, and we plan for The Child to deliver the mugs on the Friday before her break, so I start making caramels on Wednesday evening. I had made Apple Cider Caramels last year, using a recipe from Sweet Pea’s Kitchen, and they were quite good, but the recipe seems to be gone from the site now. I did print out a copy, which I eventually found tucked in a cookbook, but in my searches I also ran across the recipe below over at Smitten Kitchen, and thought, well, maybe I should give it a try.

 

The caramels are very, very simple to make, with only a few ingredients and steps, and the resulting caramels have a wonderful mild, slightly tart spiced-cider flavor. I made some slight modifications to the recipe, primarily reducing the amount of salt to account for the change in type of salt from the original recipe (she uses Maldon salt, I used regular kosher salt). I also cooked only to just slightly above 250 degrees, since I wanted a very, very soft caramel that the child could eat with her braces. Both modifications worked out very well. The Child pronounced the caramels delicious, and we didn’t have to go to the orthodontist after she ate one.

 

Thursday morning, we arrive at school, and she unloads a bag of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rainducks from my trunk, and then panics: Where are the caramels?

 

They’re for tomorrow, I say. They’re not done yet.

 

But there’s no school tomorrow! It’s going to be a snow day.

 

I’ve not heard anything about snow, and tell her this. One batch of these caramels doesn’t fill up the mugs, I tell her, so I need to make more tonight. She’s not content with this, but I check the weather on my phone and show her: Look. No snow.

 

I spend the evening making more caramels as she writes out gift tags and attaches them to the penguin mugs. I keep checking the news for weather updates, but there’s still nothing about snow, until about 9pm, when the warnings start to appear. And sure enough, at 5:30 the next morning, I receive a text that wakes me up: Emergency Notification – School canceled due to snow.

 

I peek out the window, and discover there’s about a half inch of snow in my yard. By Seattle standards, this constitutes Snowpocalypse.

 

I wake The Child, so she can see the magical, beautiful snow before it melts. She shrieks and squeals over the school cancellation, instagrams the snow on the roof outside her window, and goes back to sleep.

 

Apple Cider Caramels

Apple Cider Caramels
 
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Ingredients
  • 4 cups apple cider
  • ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 tsp kosher salt
  • 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into chunks
  • 1 cup sugar
  • ½ cup packed light brown sugar
  • ⅓ cup heavy cream
  • Neutral oil for the knife
Instructions
  1. Boil the apple cider in a 3- to- 4- quart saucepan over high heat until it is reduced to a dark, thick syrup, between ⅓ and ½ cup in volume. This takes about 35 to 40 minutes. Stir occasionally.
  2. While this is cooking, get everything else ready. Line the bottom and sides of an 8- inch straight- sided square metal baking pan with 2 long sheets of crisscrossed parchment. Set it aside. Stir the cinnamon and salt together in a small dish.
  3. Once you are finished reducing the apple cider, remove it from the heat and stir in the butter, sugars, and heavy cream. Return the pot to medium- high heat with a candy thermometer attached to the side, and let it boil until the thermometer reads 252 degrees, only about 5 minutes, keeping a close eye on it.
  4. Remove caramel from heat, add the cinnamon-salt mixture, and stir to distribute it evenly. Pour caramel into the prepared pan. Let it sit until cool and firm—about 2 hours. Once caramel is firm, transfer the block to a cutting board. Use a well- oiled knife, oiling it after each cut, to cut the caramel into 1-by-1-inch squares. Wrap each one in a 4-inch square of waxed paper, twisting the sides to close. Caramels will be somewhat on the soft side at room temperature, and chewy/firm from the fridge.
Notes
The original recipe called for "2 teaspoons flaky sea salt, such as Maldon." I didn't have that so I used 1 tsp of kosher salt, which was exactly right. Also, the original recipe uses real apple cider (the kind you find in the refrigerated foods case). I didn't have that and used regular bottled apple cider, which I admit is inferior but worked out fine.
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Lebkuchen (German Spice Cookies)

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When it’s time for Mr. Faraway to make the long trip back home, the following day, I send him with one other small gift – an extra handout from a class I took the previous week on German holiday treats. He knows how to pronounce lebkuchen, my favorite from the class, and knows details about them, too, like the fact that they keep for weeks and actually improve with age. Because it was a class, I don’t have any extra to offer him, but he samples my homemade citrus peel that is waiting to be made into cookies, and appreciatively takes the recipes with him, along with a few more he copies out of one of my cooking magazines.

I took the class the week before his visit, with a friend, who persuaded me to sign up for it months ago, and our daughters, both 13. I completely forgot about the class until she reminded me, and it was a refreshing break with the routine of years past, where I hosted an annual holiday cookie exchange. All the work of the party meant that every year, I made the same cookies, because I didn’t have time to experiment or run the risk of a new recipe that didn’t work out.

This year, we made four kinds of cookies and treats, all with German origins, like myself, my friend, and Mr. Faraway: Lebkuchen, Almond Crescents, Burnt-Sugar Almonds, and Spitzbuben (raspberry jam sandwich cookies). The four of us took turns rolling out long ropes of almond dough, which was fun, although we found the resulting cookie fairly dry – probably good with a hot cup of tea or spiced cider, not so good on its own. The Child and her friend favored the Spitzbuben, mostly for the raspberry jam, but also because they liked saying the name. It was hands down the most photogenic cookie of the evening, so the two girls started instagramming spitzbuben, then when the cookies were all eaten, checking out each other’s Instagram profiles.

My favorite, though, were the lebkuchen, cakey-soft and highly spiced, studded with lively bits of chopped orange peel. The cookie is perfect on its own, though not especially pretty to look at. The class was fun and taught by Erin Coopey, a local chef and author of The Kitchen Pantry Cookbook. As we waited for the cookies to bake, she told stories about German holiday markets and Christmas traditions.

Holiday traditions are wonderful, especially when they’re new.

Lebkuchen

 

Lebkuchen (German Spice Cookies)
 
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Prep time
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Ingredients
For Cookies
  • ¾ cup hazelnuts
  • ¾ cup sliced almonds
  • 2¾ cups AP flour
  • 3 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1 tbsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground ginger
  • ½ tsp ground cloves
  • ¾ tsp salt
  • ½ tsp baking powder
  • ½ tsp baking soda
  • 1 cup packed dark brown sugar
  • ¾ cup mild honey
  • ½ stick unsalted butter, softened
  • 2 large eggs
  • ½ cup finely chopped candied orange peel
For Icing
  • 2 cups powdered sugar
  • 3 tbsp water
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease 2 large baking sheets.
  2. Place nuts, flour, cocoa, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, salt, baking powder and baking soda in a food processor, and process until the nuts are ground into a flour.
  3. Beat together brown sugar, honey, and butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until creamy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in nut flour at low speed until just blended, then stir in orange peel.
  4. Roll tablespoons of dough into balls with dampened hands, then put on baking sheets and flatten slightly. Dough will spread during baking.
  5. Bake about 15 minutes, until surface of cookies no longer appears wet. Transfer to racks to cool.
  6. Make icing: Sift powdered sugar into a bowl, then stir in water until smooth. Evenly brush cooled cookie tops with icing. Let set one hour.
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