When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #22

Story # 22 - Pheffernus and other yummy Christmas treats! It’s magic!

Do you have a favorite dish or treat that your mom makes every Christmas?

When I was a child I loved Christmas time because my mom always made such yummy goodies! Here are a few---
I loved her fruitcake! A lot of people don’t like fruitcake but hers was so good! She would make it right after Thanksgiving. I remember helping her grind and chop up the fruit and nuts. She would put rum extract (Not the alcoholic drinking kind-that’s bad for you!) in it and then she would wrap the fruitcake in a cloth and put it in a cake tin and hide it in her pantry. By Christmas time it tasted wonderful! It’s been a long time since I’ve had really good fruitcake. I’ve taste quite a few but none have ever tasted as good as the one my mother made when I was young. She would make Pheffernus and that was so good. You add molasses to the cookie dough. You shape the dough into balls and bake them. Just before they were completely cooled she would roll them in powdered sugar. They sure were good! I also liked her Tuti Fruity Cookies! She would use a Chocolate Chip cookie recipe and then she would grind up dried fruit-the kind you used in fruit cake-raisins, nuts and then chocolate chips. She would stir all that together in the cookie dough. She would spread the dough out into a jelly roll pan (cake pan) and bake them. Then she would cut them into bars. They were yummy! It was one of my favorites! I also thought the raw cookie dough tasted good too! She also would stuff dates. I loved dates! None of my kids ever liked dates. When I first saw my mom eating them, I thought they looked like cockroaches and so I would never eat them! Dates are a wonderful source of fiber and potassium! My mom would make a fondant out of powdered sugar and condensed milk and make a small candy roll and stuff it into the date and then roll the stuffed dates in plain sugar. Oh they were so good! It probably sounds awful to you, but they really did taste good! My mom would also make sugar cookies. She also made gingerbread cookies and cut them out with a cookie cutter like a gingerbread doll. She also baked pecan, pumpkin and lemon meringue pies! It was a feast! She also made her own cranberry sauce. My mom had a lot of food allergies, especially anything made of cornstarch or corn syrup or dextrose. Those products made her asthma really bad and she would have difficulty breathing. So she made a lot of homemade goodies from scratch.

One particular treat she made and not just at Christmas was gingerbread cake and she made her own lemon sauce. She cooked the lemon sauce in a pot on the burner. Oh my goodness. That was so good! She also whipped cream and we could have whipped cream on it too. I liked the lemon sauce the very best!

When my kids were young we would go to Grandma Valdine and Grandpa Darrell Guptill’s home for Christmas. We had a potluck and everyone brought different parts of the dinner. Grandpa Darrell Guptill usually made the turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and his famous baked beans. Everyone else brought the side dishes and desserts. One time Aunt Ellen brought Buck Eyes. For short, my kids call them peanut butter balls. When my kids tasted those, they told me that I had to learn how to make those! They were really good! Well as of Dec 2007 I have been making those Buck Eyes for 23 years! That is my Christmas treat that is a family tradition for all my kids. You just take powdered sugar, butter, peanut butter and crushed Rice Krispies and make the candy dough. You roll them into balls (Buck Eyes) and then dip them in melted chocolate chips with a little bit of vegetable shortening added to the melted chocolate. I make different flavors of the chocolate to dip the Buck Eyes in and boy they are tasty! I don’t like making the balls so much. I don’t mind dipping them at all, that’s the fun part! I usually make three double bathes every Christmas as my kids love them and so do their children, my grandchildren! Yes, I’ll be making them again this year! What would Christmas be like with out grandma making peanut butter balls ( Buck Eyes)? That would be like having Christmas without a Christmas tree!