Aunt Mary’s Cherry Mashers – 1 star

Page 289

I so wanted this to work. I love cherry cordials and was hoping this would be the same flavor without the sticky mess. I spent 2 days getting this worked out to at least be able to judge the flavor of the cherry filling, which is delicious and hits the mark, but the recipe is a fail on multiple fronts. Let me count the ways.

1. It uses margarine instead of real butter and I think this may a big part of the problem. Margarines are really inconsistent, so the brand may make a huge difference. I used I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and at room temperature, as called for, it’s really, really soft. It also doesn’t get really firm when chilled so the remaining process that has you chilling/freezing doesn’t have the same effect it would with real butter.
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2. You cannot find Betty Crocker frosting mix anywhere. In fact, I couldn’t even find Jiffy frosting mix either – it’s just too easy to use plain old powdered sugar instead of buying a mix so apparently stores have just stopped carrying it. In fact, this must be a common problem because the recipe has directions on what to do if you could not find the mix… spoiler alert … they don’t work.
3. I followed the direction to reduce the sweetened condensed milk. However, no amount of whipping got it to a fluffy consistency that could be “formed” into anything. I put it in the fridge – still didn’t thicken enough. I spooned it onto parchment paper, put it in the freezer for 2 hours and still no luck. I put it in the deep freeze over night … a slightly less sloppy mess so I gave it the ole college try. You can see the results in the picture below. Refer to my suspicions on why in point #1 above.
4. At this point I stopped grading this recipe because it is a fail and I had to improvise to try and salvage something out of this mess. I have invested a jar of cherries and a day of my life I cannot get back so I want something from it. I ended up adding 2 cups more powdered sugar and beat it for several minutes to get something that would mostly hold its shape, froze it for the requisite 2 hours, and then picked up where the directions have you prepare the coating.
5. I used to regularly make 20+ pounds of candy for my office at Christmas . I am not exaggerating – I weighed it one year and it was 32 pounds of mostly bonbon-type chocolate covered candies with several flavors of centers. So I know a little bit about coating candies and this recipe breaks a whole bunch of what I have always thought of as “rules” for working with chocolate. For starters, it has you melt the chocolate in a pan directly over heat – not a double boiler and not carefully microwaved. This can result in poorly tempered chocolate that gets a haze or bloom on it that looks like mildew and is safe to eat but very unappealing to look at.
6. The next complaint I have is that they have you melt the chocolate with the chopped nuts in it. You cannot tell if the 2 different chocolates are completely melted without little unmelted chunks, which probably isn’t the worst thing in the world but drives me a little … nuts. As I said, I have done this a lot and getting perfectly smooth chocolate is very satisfying, and it makes coating your centers easy and pretty to look at when you are done. The chopped nuts may hide any unmelted chunks but the also make it harder to coat the centers – they don’t easily drain off your fork which globs up and hardens quickly which leads me to the next annoying thing about this recipe…
7. When you put frozen balls of anything into warm chocolate 2 things are going to happen: your frozen ball is going to start to melt, and the chocolate is going to start to thicken. These centers are only soft-frozen no matter what (see points 1-3 above) and they start to soften as soon as you pull them out of the freezer. I had to cut the parchment paper they were on into sections that had about 6-7 centers on them to minimize the time they were exposed to room temp air before being coated. And I had to reheat the chocolate 3 times during the coating process which was very messy with the chopped peanuts in it.
8. Finally, the directions have you store this in the fridge – another no-no with chocolate. When you pull this out to serve it you better eat it right away, because 2 minutes on the counter in South Carolina and it is starting to sweat and is a sticky mess to eat.

If you are going to make this do a few things differently:

• Use a Fantasy Fudge recipe with white chocolate chips and add chopped cherries to it instead of using the filling in the book. Let it cool a bit then form into balls.
• Use straight almond bark chocolate melted in a double boiler or carefully melted in the microwave instead of the coating in the book. (I did this for several of them just to see how it tastes without the chopped nuts).
• Store in an airtight container at room temp instead of refrigerated as described in the book.

In short, don’t use this recipe.

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