making holiday bark & other adventures in trying to cheer up madeleine

madeleine is having a horrible day. even the start of the day was bad. maybe the worst part, in fact. she woke to her very chapped lips feeling sealed shut and when she opened them, the skin tore just a little bit, making them hurt all the more.

"then." she says, pausing for emphasis. "this other kid was laughing at me during gym class, trying to get me to mess up the game. and." she stops dramatically again, "in miss medina's class two boys were bossing me around." horror of horrors. can you imagine anything worse for the oh-so demure miss madeleiene?

to top everything off, her mother (me) has just told her she was being unhelpful by putting her fingers in carter's armpits to try to wake him up. "i was just try-ing (emphasis on -ing) to help." huff. puff. stomp, stomp, stomp.

there's a lot i could say right now. about the efficacy and kindness, for that matter, of armpit tickling as a wake-up call. but what would be the use of any of that when madeleine has her head buried in her pillow in a dramatic protest against the universe? i'm mildly annoyed at all the drama and a hundred mini-lectures are running through my head, but instead, by some miracle, this pops out---

"do you wanna make some bark with me?"

it's funny, because madeleine doesn't know what bark is, no earthly idea, but the idea of making something together, anything at all, perks her right up and she bounces off her bed of woes and skips into the kitchen. "sure," she says. "what's bark?"

bark is the candy of choice for the candymaker who doesn't want to fuss with candy thermometers, exact recipes or instructions of any sort. it only takes 15 or twenty minutes and even the most adorable, disaster-prone three year old, cannot mess it up. just ask carter.

we start out pouring two bags of dark chocolate chips into a heavy saucepan (as heavy as they make saucepans bought off the clearance section of tjmaxx domestics aisles) and stir gently as the chocolate melts on low heat. i tell madeleine, to carter's great pride, how he tricked our friend lourdes into giving him a bowl of chocolate chips for lunch. and then she tells us for the umpteenth time, the joke miss medina told in spanish about some kid having ants in their pants. we take turns while the chocolate melts demonstrating for the others what it looks like to have ants in your pants.

this, evidentally, is very, very funny. to see your mother shake her groove thang in the kitchen as if she has ants in her pants.

we pour out the chocolate on a heavily buttered sheet of wax paper lying on a cookie sheet, and rinse out our one heavy pan to do the white chips now. several calls were made to decide if wax paper was a good idea. i dial, madeleine talks, relaying messages from various family members. carter stirs. all familial cooking experts decide butter waxed paper cannot hurt.

then we pour the two bags of melted white chocolate onto the dark. we should have made two cookie sheets worth, instead of pouring it all thick into one pan, but we'll know better next time.

while i pour, madeleine takes the ziplocked bags of candy canes and smashes the hell out of them on the counter. i thought this would take several large whacks to make the pieces small enough. but to her delight and my surprise, evidentally it all takes twice. go madeleine. all that intensity & suffering today made for a jillion perfectly smashed pieces. sanctioned violence. and at christmas. who knew.

carter and i take turns pressing the pieces of peppermint candy into our "bark" while madeleine opts out, newly offended about some other cosmic injustice. we place the pan in the refrigerator to harden. later in the night when everyone is still asleep, dead to the world, carter and i will break it apart and put all the nice broken pieces in pretty little bags tied with red ric rac from our fabric store where vietnamese, korean, spanish and several african dialects are spoken.

we are the night owls, me and carter, doing santa's work while madeleine sleeps. she is busy righting the wrongs of the world in her dreams even as we work to give her something to smile about tomorrow, a new day for everything to go just right.

Posted by Jen at November 30, 2004 01:11 PM