Holiday Goodies

According to their site, Andes Crème de Menthe candies rank as the “number one after-dinner mint” delivering a “smooth blend of mint and chocolate flavors– the perfect post-meal treat”.

They are particularly popular during the holidays and easy to find at your local grocery store. They help bring these easy chocolate “brownie” cookies to a new level of decadence.

After removing the cookies from the oven, each one is topped with an Andes mint while still warm. The residual heat melts the candy, turning it into a spreadable “frosting” to swirl over each cookie.

They’ll be the hit of any holiday gathering cookie swap.

This morning as I was headed to work wishing that I was celebrating Fat Tuesday in New Orleans, Mobile, Venice, or anywhere other than snowy New York; I walked past the local bakery where I was aghast to see a King Cake for sale in the window for $65 dollars!  

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a King Cake, it is a fairly simple brioche pastry twisted into a wreath and decorated with multi-hued icing in colors of purple, green and gold. 

The delicacy (and I use the word in jest) is sometimes filled with cream cheese or cinnamon, but the true secret to a King Cake is that baked somewhere inside is a tiny plastic baby and the person who finds the trinket, and hopefully doesn't swallow it, is considered king for the day. 

A French tradition that in this country is centered around Mardi Gras, King Cake is eaten during the pre-Lenten hurrah right up through Fat Tuesday, the final day in while unbridled Bacchanalian abandon is allowed to continue. 

Each year just before Christmas, we had a holiday gathering for all the children and their families at the campus child care center I worked at for several years. Each family contributed a plate of holiday treats.

One year, as I moved around the Center visiting with parents and siblings of the preschoolers I spent time with each day, I happened upon a conversation between two preschoolers. They each held one of those peanut butter cookies with a Hershey kiss in the middle.

“Kiss me,” said the little girl as she looked at the confused little boy in front of her. “You can’t take a bite of your kissy cookie until you kiss me. That’s what my mom and dad do,” she said sweetly. I pictured her young parents sitting on the couch in their living room at home with a tin of Kissy Cookies resting on their laps, sharing a quick little peck as they ate cookies together. I held back a little giggle.

When I think of Halloween, I think hot dogs.  People tend to find this association odd, some are even angered by it, but to me it feels perfectly natural.  When I was younger, my mother used to grill hot dogs in our driveway for the trick or treaters and dole out beer in red plastic cups to the adults, providing a bit of a respite for parents whose kids were running around the neighborhood injected with copious amounts of sugar. 

I was never much of a walker and I never got off on travelling in packs (why I live in New York I don't know), but even more importantly, I loved and still adore a good hot dog.  Essentially, this ritual made my Halloween quite perfect.

The ritual ended, sadly, when I moved to New York to go to college.  There are very few driveways in Manhattan, and there is a bar or a Gray's Papaya on every street corner, so if people need a beer or a frank, they are basically set year round.  Nobody shared my passion for hot dogs at Halloween, unless they were terribly after drunk taking too many orange jello shots at some themed downtown party, in which case that little beef wonder became something of a valuable commodity, a bonafide savior in fact.