Christmas Treats

Last night  I had a productive evening in the kitchen, making treats for Christmas presents.

As it's pretty close to Christmas, I decided on Chocolate Bark (or something similar) and fudge.

The Chocolate Bark is particularly easy and effective - melt chocolate, shape into bars (or blocks, or freeform shapes) and add toppings.

The toppings I used were:

• Walnut, Almond and Pecan
• Almond and white chocolate nibs
• Walnut, dried cherry and dried cranberry
• Mixed fruit
• White chocolate swirl

Here they are setting:

There's two of each flavour, and I'll package them up in cellophane bags with pretty labels (pics to follow - once I've actually made the labels!)

Then fudge... It's gorgeous, but such a pain to make. Not complicated, but it requires a tonne of stirring.

Melt butter, sugar, milk and condensed milk together over a low heat. Stir lots until all the sugar had melted/dissolved. Then boil, stirring lots. After about 10 minutes of that, you take it off the heat and stir/beat for about another 10 minutes... Like I said, a tonne of stirring! Plus, it gets thicker during the last stage - so as your arm gets more and more tired, it gets more and more difficult to stir *rolls eyes*

It doesn't look like much right now, but it will be sliced into cubes and packaged in little boxes. There are 2 varieties here... Plain and Whisky.  Having "tested" the reject sections, I can confirm that they are both very good *grins*