Chocolate-Covered Wisconsin Brandied Tart Cherries

Christmas is almost here, but before you settle in with your family around the tree, we've got a couple of more holiday treat recipes for you to try.

This summer when we made Brandied Door County Tart Cherries, we knew we would want to use some of them come Christmastime.

We simply covered a bunch in chocolate for some homemade Chocolate-Covered Wisconsin Brandied Tart Cherries. Our friends Peef and Lo at Burp! have a recipe that we've drooled over.

The best thing about these is that most of the work has been done (the canning process takes far longer than anything else). Our recipe simply calls for some chocolate melted, then poured into a mold. Mix up a little dry fondant, cherry juice and invertase (fondant and invertase purchased from Cook's in West Allis) and drop 1/3 teaspoon of the mixture into each chocolate-covered mold. Drop a cherry in each spot and cover with more chocolate, then refrigerate.

Brandied cherries in the mold, before they are covered with chocolate.

Toffee Ice Cream

With our January and February kitchen laziness and our March puppy excitement, we're really behind on some of our intended blog posts. This is one of those posts.

For Christmas, Melissa made some awesome toffee. But, juggling many things in the kitchen that weekend, she made a calculating error and the first batch of toffee was thicker than intended.

We didn't want to break it up and give away as presents. So, what to do?

Toffee Ice Cream, of course!

The toffee Melissa made was this one we wrote about in January 2010. And we made the vanilla ice cream from last April. Then she put the toffee in a food processor and combined that with the ice cream.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things.