The celebration of Valentine’s Day is never complete without having given or received one of these intricately decorated Valentine’s Day candy gift boxes which is the epitome of a lover’s declaration of his feelings. The variety of such Valentine’s Day candy gifts are so amazing that one will find it hard to choose from the various selections displayed in the candy stores.
Same as in the past, it makes you tingle with excitement when you are given a gift of a gorgeous box of Valentine’s Day chocolates which comes in many different shapes and sizes. If you girlfriend loves chocolates, why not surprise and delight her with a gift of a big bouquet of Chocolate flowers instead of the traditional bouquet of flowers? I’m sure she will be thrilled with your innovativeness. You can find novel and very exciting Valentine’s Day Candy gifts not only in the shops but also online. You can get them in different types and categories to suit each person’s mentality not to mention affordability.
With you and everyone else under the sun buying Valentine’s Day Candy gifts for that special person in your life, how can you make your own gift more personal ?
A cardinal rule is to ensure that your partner is a chocolate lover and that he/she will really and truly appreciate your gift of Valentine’s Day Candy.
While some like dark or even bitter chocolate, there are others who prefer the lighter white chocolate or the sugarless ones, depending on their dietary requirements,
Did you know that a simple bar of “Mars” means “I love you”? Wouldn’t it be the sweetest way of saying the 3 words?
There are those who prefer nougat or caramel which also can be given as a Valentine’s Day candy gift.
You can also get personalized candy bars, pralines, jelly beans, chocolate covered nuts, baskets of chocolates or even luscious looking candy trees decorated with chocolate.
Another important point to keep in mind is that an overwhelming number of men are said to prefer receiving Valentine’s Day Candy gifts or Chocolate Roses over flowers. Therefore you must ensure that you give him/her what they prefer and not what you would like to have yourself.
So there you are, buy any one of the above mentioned Valentine’s Day Candy gifts for your loved one and you can be sure he/she will make you his one and only Valentine this year.
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Purim Baskets - Mishloach Manos
Hamantaschen- Purim Cookies
Shalach Manos for Kids
Valentine's Day Candy
Does anyone wonder how and when this custom began? One of the common beliefs is that during the 1800’s, lovelorn patients were told by their doctors to eat as much chocolate as possible to calm them and sooth their nerves. It is also thought that as far back as the era of the Aztec empire, chocolate was considered an aphrodisiac and was used to win love.
Although it is the heart shaped Valentine’s Day candy that is popular today, in days gone by, Valentine’s Day candy was made in the shape of watches, anchors, horseshoes, or even postcards with lengthy messages of love written on them. The messages found inside Valentine’s Day Candy hearts today, are much shorter and sweeter and in keeping with the “cool” talk of the modern generation.
Valentine's Day Candy
Close upon a century now makers of Valentine’s Day Candy have been coming up with unique and novel ways of saying “I love you”. Apparently, just one company produces more than 100,000 pounds of Valentine’s Day Candy chocolate hearts per day and it is said that approximately 8 billion lovers are presented with these delectable candy chocolates within a period of six weeks. Although the peak season for the sale of these Valentine’s Day Candy hearts is just one month, the candy hearts are produced round the year for 11 months.
With great competition among manufacturers of Valentine’s Day candy, to invent novel confections to Valentine’s Day Candy titillate the palate of lovers, they come up with yummy new fillings for chocolates while catchy and romantic messages are introduced every year. Some of the more popular recent ones included such messages as “Puppy Love”, “Melt my Heart”, “Cloud Nine” and even “Take a walk”!
What lover can resist a Valentine’s Day Candy Chocolate heart that says “Melt my Heart” or “Make me yours”? I bet you can’t and neither can I.
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Chocolate Rugelach is a crowd favorite. You can get them dairy and fill your rugelach with milk chocolate. Or you can enjoy your rugelach after your Shabbos meal by adding pareve or dark chocolate and by substituting margarine for butter in your pastry.
Cinnamon Rugelach are also a favorite. These are especially mouthwatering to bake when the aromas from the cinnamon start to spread throughout your kitchen.
Apricot Rugelach are probably the most common fruit flavored rugelach pastries available. There is something about the sweetness of the dough with the tanginess of the apricot that makes it a delicious combination.
Raspberry Rugelach are a nice alternative to the common chocolate and cinnamon rugelach types. They go great with a cup of fruit flavored tea.
A rugelach platter is a great way to show somebody that you care. It can celebrate the birth of a baby, a recent marriage, or as a holiday gift.
It is pretty easy to make rugelach . There is no wrong way to eat Rugelach. Rugelach can be enjoyed straight from the oven or right out of the store. They can be crunchy or chewy, with nuts or without. The choice is yours
Full Rugelach Recipe Transcript
Hi, I’m Sean Farrell. I recently graduated from the Culinary Institute of America with my Bachelors Degree in Baking and Pastry Arts Management. After graduation, I took advantage of one of the CIA’s wonderful opportunities by interning with Chef Francisco Migoya at the Apple Pie Bakery Café. Today, we are going to make one of my favourite cookies, Rugelach. The first step is to make the filling. We are going to start with toasting out pecans. Now, it’s important to toast the pecans because it tends to bring out the oils in the nuts giving more flavour sort of filling. Rugelach is a traditional Eastern European treat, celebrated during the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. In Yiddish, Rugelach means â little twists. I can tell my pecans are done toasting by the smell in the air, so I’m going to transfer them to a food processor. To this, we are going to add a small amount of chocolate and raspberry jam. To create a paste with all these ingredients in order to make our filling for our Rugelach, you know, you have the right texture for your paste when the mixture starts to pull away from the sides. Now, we’ll set this mixture aside while we make our dough. The first thing we do to make the dough is to sift all of our dry ingredients. We are going to take salt and I’ll put it in this flour. Well, it’s important to sift to make sure we get all the lumps out of the flour and make sure we aerate it as well. After we sift our flour and our salt, the next step is to cream the cream cheese and butter. We know when our mixture is creamed when the mixture is light in color. Take our sifted ingredients and add it into our. I added all of our dry ingredients at once. Now, we are just going to mix the mixture until it comes together. We know it’s ready when the mixture pulls off the sides, using a rubber spatula, just scrape the mixture off of the pedal making sure to scrape down the sides as well. Take our finished dough and wrap it in plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour. I’m shaping it into a rectangle because later, we are going to perform what we call a threefold in order to have our flaky layers in our Rugelach. The dough has been chilling for at least an hour.
So now we are going to take it out of the refrigerator and roll it out and perform a what we call threefold. Now, it’s important that we work with the floured surface. Keep in mind that we need to keep a rectangular shape in order to perform threefold. Now, the filing that we used, even though we used chocolate, pecans and raspberry jam, use anything, from marzipan, to apricot jam, walnuts or just plain cinnamon sugar. The reasoning for performing the threefold is to make sure that all the butter and the cream cheese are incorporated into the layer of the dough. This is going to give us a final texture that’s flakey and a beautiful cookie. Now, if your dough cracks, just press it together lightly with your fingers. We are going to roll our dough well, just until it’s about little less than an inch thick. Now, I am going to take my and just straighten out the sides. As you can see, I am being careful to keep our rectangle shape. Now, to perform a threefold just think of how you fold a letter: one, two, three. On one side, and two. Straighten up the sides again. Now, we are going to wrap it out in plastic wrap and chill it again for another hour.
So, an hour has gone by. We have our chilled three-folded dough. Using our divide this into three potions. As you can see, we have our nice flakey layers. We have one, two, three. With the rolling pin, roll this out until it’s around a quarter inch thick. So once my dough’s about a quarter inch thick, I am going to take a ten inch room. If you don’t have one of these, just use a large mixing bowl. Brush off on flour, take our filling, putting about a quarter of it on to the surface of the dough. Mixing down lightly. Spread the mixture as thinly as you possibly can, leaving about an inch circumference around the edge with the dough. And you can also use your hands as well. We are going to take some cinnamon sugar and sprinkler it lightly on the surface. Divide our circle into either 12 or 16 triangles. The easiest way to do that is to start from the centre and divide our circle into four quarters. And it doesn’t have to be 16 triangles; it can be however big as you want it to be. For instance, we’ll take this slice and simply take the widest base and roll it forward, similar to how you shape . Now, Rugelach is a very simply cookie to make. Our dough has butter and pink cheese in it. So you need to take care in making sure that the dough is nicely chilled, otherwise your dough will become sticky and hard to shape. Once we’ve finished rolling out all of our Rugelach, we want to transfer them to a parchment lined baking sheet or lightly sprayed baking sheep , making sure that we have a good amount of space in between each cookie, to allow for even spread. Have a small amount of egg wash here, that we’re just going to top of each cookie. Now we egg wash the cookies because they are going to give us a nice brown color on the surface. After we egg wash our cookies, we are going to sprinkle small amount of cinnamon sugar on the surface and transfer them to a pre-heated oven to 375 degrees and bake them for about 25 to 30 minutes or until they are golden brown. After about 25 minutes, I am taking the last batch out of the oven. As you can see, they have a beautiful crescent shape and a nice golden color. A little bit of sheen, that’s from the cinnamon sugar. And it’s important to put this on wire rack. It helps to make sure that the bottoms of the cookies don’t get too soggy.
You can find this recipe and many others in CIA’s Baking at Home with the Culinary Institute of America,
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Also known as jelly doughnuts. These delicious lightweight doughnuts are often topped with powdered sugar or different flavor icings. If you are not a jelly person, there are also sufganiyot available that are filled with chocolate or nothing at all. It is a great treat for the kids!
Potato Latkes:
There is never a need for an excuse to enjoy some crunchy potato latkes, but Hanukkah serves as a great one! These are often served with yummy homemade applesauce to balance the salty and sweet flavors.
Chanukah Gelt:
Who doesn’t love money? Gelt, which means money in Yiddish, are chocolate coins that often are bet in a game of dreidel. If you don’t know the rules to this game of chance, just look out for the Hebrew letter gimmel, and the whole pot becomes yours.
Applesauce:
This side dish complements your latkes and can double as a delicious and nutritious dessert. Applesauce can be enjoyed straight from the store bought bottle to the homemade version cooling in the pot.
Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday where it is encouraged to eat deep-fried and oily foods. Hanukkah only comes once a year (yes, it does last eight days), and it is okay to enjoy your favorite holiday foods while watching portion sizes and avoid going for thirds. Many people prefer the real stuff, but for those that don’t, there are many other healthy variations of your favorite Hannukah foods, such as the vegetable patty instead of the carb filled potato pancake.
We would love to hear from you. What is your favorite Hanukkah Food?. ]]>
This is probably the most famous "dangerous Halloween candy" story of them all. Most parents warn their kids not to touch fresh fruit they get trick-o-treating. Halloween razor blade stories began to replace poisoned candy stories in the mid-1960s.
Jack Santino, author of "Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life," wrote that in 1968 the New Jersey legislature passed a law mandating prison terms for people who boobytrapped apples. That year people found 13 apples with razor blades in them.
But Santino said the cases where more details are available indicate that about 75 percent were hoaxes, where the parents or the kids put the razors in themselves.
And another study tracked 80 cases of sharp objects in food since 1959 and almost all were hoaxes. Only 10 caused even a minor injury and the worst was a few stitches.
Needles in snickers
(Judy Sloan Reich, s-s / April 13, 2004)
Needles in candy
In 2000 James Joseph Smith of Minneapolis allegedly put needles in Snickers bars and gave them out to kids on Halloween. A 14-year-old boy was pricked when he bit into the candy, but no one needed medical care.
Smith was charged with one count of adulterating a substance with intent to cause death, harm or illness.
Drugs in candy
candy: cocaine poisoning
(TFW / October 19, 2004)
A three-year-old in New Britain, Conn., was diagnosed with cocaine poisoning after Halloween1994.
The finger was pointed at his Halloween candy, but no drugs were found on the leftover piece of candy.
Drugs in candy
candy: herion
(TFW/Iris Schneider / October 30, 2006)
On Nov. 2, 1970, Kevin Toston, 5, lapsed into a coma and died of a herion overdose. Analysis of some of his Halloween candy showed it had been sprinkled with heroin.
Detroit police concluded the boy had gotten into his uncle’s herion stash, and his family sprinkled the heroin on Kevin's candy afterward to protect the uncle.
Fruit Snacks
(TWP / October 25, 2007)
Poison on candy
In October 1988 the New York Times reported that traces strychnine were found in a box of Sunkist Fun Fruits Dinosaurs purchased in a New Jersey grocery store.
The Food and Drug Administration tested the substance and found out it was cornstarch. But the manufacturer had already destroyed 9,400 cases of the snacks because it said its image was hurt.
Snickers with drugs
(handout / October 17, 2004)
Handing out drugs
In 2000 some kids in Hercules, Calif., came home from trick-o-treating with packets of marijuana done up to look like mini Snickers bars. The police traced the fake candy to a single house.
They found the homeowner didn't know the Snickers were actually mini marijuana packs. He was a postal worker who took the candy home when it ended up in the dead letter office.
Source: snopes.com
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