We all know the best gifts are made by hand, or at least the ones made with the best intentions.

My stepmother and I made the decision to spend the afternoon in her kitchen making colorful hard candy and delightful white and milk chocolate candies for Christmas presents. We were both adults, and agreed it couldn't be that complicated, since we each had fond memories of watching grandparents and parents making various confectionaries that everyone loved.

We melted the white and milk chocolate in separate pans and then placed the candies on cookie sheets, to harden or set. After quite awhile we noticed they weren't exactly hardening or setting. We were puzzled. We kept checking them, and they were still a bit mushy at least tacky certainly not as set as they should be. Then it dawned on us. We didn't put any wax in the chocolate. After checking a cookbook we noticed it listed wax as an ingredient and we had no wax. We also had no intention of getting in the car and driving to get any wax. So we thought of the next best thing. Since it was in the dead of winter and cold outside, we thought placing the cookie sheets outside on the back porch should do the trick. The only possible problem we could think of was small furry yard vermin. We were fearful squirrels, mice, or chipmunks might be curious and destroy or consume our delectable treats. We took turns on "Vermin Patrol" to keep an eye on our cookie sheets and a few hours later we were able to finally bring them in. They looked great, except for a few paw prints but it would appear as though we were simply being "creative."

The colorful hard candy was a different story. Red and green, clear and broken into pieces, my grandmother had made peppermint and spearmint flavored candy every year since I was five years old. I knew I could replicate it after watching her carefully place the towels over the candy before taking the small hammer and breaking it into pieces of different shapes and sizes. It was my favorite.

We cooked the candy to a rolling boil, and watched it get thicker and thicker, until we thought it was ready. Unfortunately we didn't possess a necessary piece of equipment, a candy thermometer. Since we weren't going to go get wax for the chocolate, we certainly weren't going to go get a candy thermometer either. So we did what we thought was best we guessed.

After letting the candy cool it looked great. It was clear, red, green, and beautiful. We waited long enough to break it into pieces and then it was time to taste it. About that time, my dad came around the corner, so we thought, hey why not?

Dad took a nice medium large piece of the red peppermint and said it tasted very good. Then after about thirty seconds his expression started to change. His speech became slurred as he tried to speak and tell us that the stuff was sticking to his partial. His eyes got bigger and his mouth got wider as we noticed his partial was now dislodged and sitting sideways in his mouth. He was groaning now, and saliva was starting to drip from the sides of his mouth as he reached into his mouth and grabbed his partial to pull it out.
By now we were trying not to laugh, but it was pretty difficult since his expression was hilarious. As he pulled his partial out, it looked like something out of an alien movie. The stuff was completely covering the sides and back and stuck firmly without moving. It took twenty minutes rinsing under scalding water to remove it.

We decided the only people we would give it to as gifts were to children who needed to lose baby teeth and people we weren't tremendously fond of like Aunt Betty.

Learn more about this author, Pam From Hell.
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