More hard-times goodies

One day this winter I was without ready-made sweets of any kind. I was also a little bit miffed, because nobody gave me any chocolate-covered cherries for Christmas or my birthday; I used to get them every year. The more I thought about it, the miffed-er I got, thinking about the unfairness of it all.

So I dumped a box of powdered sugar into a mixing bowl and made a sort of hard fondant with some white Zinfandel. After rolling this out, I lined up some candied cherries leftover from Christmas and cut the candy into squares around the cherries, rolled them up into balls, and dipped them in a little pot of melted milk-chocolate that I had simmering on the stove. I left them sit on waxed paper until the chocolate hardened.

I cried when Brock stopped making their superior chocolate-covered cherries. But I'm here to tell you, the ones I made had Brock beat by an international mile. And you didn't get syrup all over your hand and down your arm and chin when you bit one, because I used candied instead of maraschino cherries. The insides were just soft enough and winey enough to make tears of joy well up behind your eyelids.