Along with Halloween and Easter, Christmas is a candy holiday.
What, exactly, is a sugar plum? Have you or anyone you know ever actually eaten one? More on this later... for now, any discussion of Christmas sweets surely begins with the ubiquitous candy cane.
As chocolate eggs are to Easter and candy corn to Halloween, so too is the candy cane the emblematic sweet of Christmas. Like Easter and Halloween sweets, candy canes come from the store... no one actually makes them in their own kitchen. But unlike Easter and Halloween, Christmas is noteworthy for its plethora of homemade confections. Here are a trio of favorites--
Chocolate Truffle Balls
VERY easy to make... recipe HERE. Lots of people like to add a splash of booze. Cognac-style (dry) brandy or bourbon work nicely.
Pfeffernusse Cookies (German Spice Cookies)
A little more work than the truffles, but if you actually like to bake, why buy them when you can make them? Recipe HERE.
Pecan Pralines
It's a southern thing... think Christmas in Dixie while you're washing these down with a little bourbon. Recipe HERE.
Now back to that Sugar Plum--
The notion of "sugar plums" dates back perhaps a thousand years, and the meaning of the term has loosened up to include all manner of candies, not all of which are even made from plums. HERE is a recipe made with plums (albeit in the form of prunes) that purports to be both authentic and easy to make. Indeed, the hardest part might be finding the coarse sugar... check the baking supplies section.
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