The Tyranny Of The See’s

So, after meeting up with some sewing bloggers and consuming wonderful See’s chocolates with them, I got to thinking about the horror and deprivation of being too far from Mary See’s main stomping grounds.  Why, I asked myself, should those of us unfortunate enough to be stranded 3,000 miles away from Nirvana, be forced to suffer so?

Ah, sweet mystery of life.

Naturally, in spite of having read this article the very day of my search, I went online to find  a solution to this vexing problem.  And I found it, in several recipes allegedly replicateing my favorite-of-all-favorite See’s Candies, the Dark Chocolate Bordeaux.

I experimented, and fiddled, changed things up, and made a few pounds.  The first batch was messy:

But they still looked nice on a plate:

We ate them anyway.  The flavor?  Yuuuum, and very, very Bordeaux!  However, I’d crystallized the sugar a bit, so naturally I had to make more.

The second batch was neater, and dressed up nicely.  We ate it, too.  Mr. Noile thinks these are better than See’s, but Mr. Noile is a bit of a renegade.  I ate most of them, anyway, so perhaps his judgement is skewed.

It turns out that Michael’s, the ubiquitous craft store, sells candy boxes and foil cups:

Candy making, not unlike sewing, has its own set of tricks.  After the first batch, I realized that it was important to boil the brown sugar fondant at a relatively low temperature, and for a very short period of time.

A melon baller was perfect for scooping up uniformly sized centers, and a fondue fork — with snake-tongue prongs — was the right thing for dipping the centers into the chocolate.  The prongs held the fondant so that it didn’t slip off.  A common table fork was helpful to slide the dipped candies off the fondue fork.

Michael’s also has cute little gold elastics for closing the boxes (though you could probably buy any color by the yard at a fabric store):

Michael’s had seals, too, but I didn’t put one on this box.  (It wasn’t going to be long for this world.)  Any office supply store might offer a choice of those, too.

Tempering the chocolate in the microwave required some practice; it’s best to melt it in short bursts, not in longer sessions, which can make the chocolate lumpy.  I used Hershey’s Special Dark rather than a better European brand; it was just right with the Bordeaux-like centers, and, anyway, See’s is a quintessentially USA-American candy, so USA chocolate seemed appropriate.  The flavor was just right with the brown-sugar-coffee centers.

I used Wilton’s sprinkles — a travesty if ever there were one — but next time (that would be after we lose the weight we just gained), I’ll use these Dutch sprinkles.  They can’t be worse, and they sound a whole lot better than the rather waxy Wilton’s.  It’ll go better with the organic cream and butter.

Here’s another useful tip: Really good candies don’t have either corn syrup or sweetened evaporated milk in them; you might get sweets that way, but you won’t get anything like See’s.  And never, never use the candy-making pellets on sale in craft departments.  They aren’t really food.  Honest, they aren’t.