candyland...

Today is our holiday lunch (!) and we were encouraged to bring a dessert (or, if we didn't want to bake, we were gently encouraged to get something delicious at Sweet Mandy B's). I baked some festive brownies (oh, stop. They have funfetti chips in them, not POT, although I suppose that would also be very festive...)

And I also really wanted to try the candy recipe below, which came from Tina Nordstrom's book, A Culinary Tour of Sweden and from the companion show on PBS,New Scandinavian Cooking.

The recipe is deceptively simple:

1/2 lb (250 g) nougat
1/4 lb. (125 g) dark chocolate
2 oz (50 g) flaked almonds
2 oz (50 g) chopped roasted hazelnuts 1.75 oz (50 g) raisins
2 oz (50 g) walnuts
Zest of 1 orange

This is how you do it:
Melt the nougat and chocolate in a saucepan over another saucepan with boiling water. When it is completely melted together, mix in the nuts.
Line a bread loaf tin with waxed paper. Pour in the mixture. Let it harden for a few hours in the fridge before removing it.

The major stumbling block here (any guesses?) is the first ingredient: nougat. I am not even officially sure what nougat actually IS, making it really hard to determine a possible substitute. Which we had to do, because I don't know if you know this? But it is nearly impossible to find nougat anywhere. Not at Dominick's, Jewel, Michael's (although they did have a variety of cake/candy making things), The Home Economist or Produce World. Rather than just chuck the whole affair, we decided eventually to substitute almond paste - either that or make our own nougat, which seemed more time consuming than the actual recipe.

So, ingredients decided, we started melting the chocolate and almond paste. Well, sort of. The paste didn't melt as such, but we mushed it up as best as we could. Added the nuts and zest and mushed the whole thing up some more. Then we dumped the whole thing into the wax paper lined bread loaf tin and threw it into the fridge to harden up.

Taste it (as Tina might say) - it was essentially chocolate covered almond goo. With nuts. Not bad, but I don't really think that's what they had in mind with the recipe. I didn't bring any of it to work today, though. Just the brownies.

You're welcome, co-workers. And Merry Christmas.