Last fall, Sean and I received a jar of P.B. Loco Curry Peanut Butter from my mom, who was right on in thinking that it was very much up our alley.

After we’d shared a couple of delicious snacks of curry peanut butter with apple slices, I was struck by a grocery-store inspiration! I saw chocolate chips on the shelf and decided to give some candy making a try. After all, peanut butter and chocolate is an old stand-by, the curry peanut butter was tasty, and I’ve had the good fortune to have tried a couple of really good curry-chocolate combinations, so why not put all three together?

I brought home a couple of bags of the white and dark chocolate chips, and got to experimenting. I used a little over half the jar of our curry peanut butter on the first batch, and they turned out great! Got a few odd looks when offering them to friends, but most people were willing to give it a try – and just about everyone who tried them liked them.

But the only P.B. Loco store that I’m aware of is in a mall in Scottsdale, and I’m in Portland. And we wanted to make more – without asking my mom to go to the mall and mail us more peanut butter. So it was back to the kitchen to work out a recipe using only ingredients I could find in my local grocery store. Fortunately, it only took a few tries to get it right – and I can’t say it was a hardship for Sean and I to eat the mistakes.

This final version ended up pretty much just as I was hoping – rich and smooth and just a touch spicy, with some nice texture from the peanut bits and a good balance of flavors that leaves a great taste in your mouth after eating them. Without further ado, here’s the recipe!

Ingredients:

1.5 12-oz bags dark chocolate chips*
1     12-oz bag white chocolate chips*
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
1.5 Tbsp curry powder
Cinnamon for dusting

Rectangular cake pan or other deep-sided pan
2 Microwave safe bowls (one for dark chocolate, one for white chocolate mixture)

*Chocolate chips are ideal because they don’t need to be tempered. If you want to try this with chocolate bars, melting wafers, or some other initial form of chocolate, you’ll need to temper the chocolate to make sure it solidifies well and doesn’t end up covered quickly with powdery white bloom. More on how and why to temper chocolate here.

Melting chocolate in a microwave:

I used a microwave for chocolate melting instead of a double boiler because it’s quite a bit faster, and you don’t have to worry about accidentally getting water in the chocolate and making it seize. Here’s the basic procedure:

1. Empty your chocolate chips into a microwave safe bowl – I actually used a glass measuring cup.
2. Microwave for 30 seconds on 50% power. Remove and stir as best you can – the chocolate will likely still be pretty solid at this point.
3. Microwave another 30 seconds on 50% power, then stir again. Repeat until the chocolate is smoothly melted. Make sure you are actually pulling the chocolate out and stirring at each interval – the stirring is very important, as it spreads the heat throughout and allows more of the chocolate to melt at each step. If you don’t stop and stir, you could end up burning your chocolate before you think it’s melted. Also note that different types of chocolate will melt differently – the white chips, for example, not only melt faster than the dark chocolate but also to a more liquid consistency.

Making the candy:

1. Line  pan with aluminum foil.
2. Melt 3/4 bag of dark chocolate chips.
3. Pour the melted chocolate into pan and spread evenly across the bottom. Shake the pan gently a few times to help the layer even out.
4. Place pan with chocolate layer into the refrigerator for 2-5 minutes (optional, allows for easier spreading of the next layer, but may increase the likelihood of layers splitting later on.)
5. Melt 1 bag of white chocolate chips.
6. Mix peanut butter and curry powder into melted white chocolate until evenly distributed.
7. Pour the peanut butter mixture into pan and spread evenly over the bottom chocolate layer. Shake the pan gently again.
8. Place pan back into refrigerator for 2-5 minutes
9. Melt remaining dark chocolate chips
10. Pour melted chocolate into pan and spread evenly. Shake pan gently again.
11. Dust with cinnamon
12. Place pan into refrigerator to cool. Once cooled and solidified, remove candy from the pan, peel off the aluminum foil, and slice into bite-sized pieces. I found that a pizza cutter  worked really well to cut through the dense chocolate.

Store in refrigerator, or in freezer and allow to warm before serving. Makes lots – be ready to share!

Here we are, almost halfway through January of 2009 – how did that happen so soon?

We had a lovely holiday, all things considered. Portland got more snow in the last few weeks of December than we generally get in 1-2 years, at least. As this city is prepared to deal with rain far better than snow (after all, we generally get an inch or less at a time, one to two times a year, so it’s not usually much of an issue) everything more or less shut down.

So I ended up housebound with Sean for about a week, and we absolutely made the most of it. He works nights, so we generally get limited time together because of the schedule mismatch. But with a week and a half at home, I was able to switch my schedule around to nights  - I’m quite a natural night owl myself, so it was nice not to have to fight it for a while.

We decided to give almost entirely handmade or self-designed gifts this year. I think the only purchased present we gave was some microdistilled brandy and raspberry liqueur that we picked up for Sean’s dad this summer while taking a tasting tour at the Brandy Peak distillery on the southern Oregon coast. I also designed a handful of custom laser cut keychains, ornaments, and jewelry items for other gifts, knit one hat, and we made the Kahlua and two different flavors of infused vinegars pictured above.

The Kahlua was Sean’s idea, months and months ago. We got a recipe from someone he works with who makes it occasionally, but the recipe called for instant coffee, and that was just not going to fly in our java-soaked household. We drink a lot of coffee, and we like the good stuff, so we weren’t about to go out and pick up something we wouldn’t drink ourselves to make gifts for our friends and family. So I flexed my google-fu a bit and came up with this recipe, using toddy coffee.

Speaking of which, if you haven’t tried toddy coffee, you should! It’s a cold-brew method that involves soaking very coarsely ground coffee beans in cold water for 12 hours. You end up with a coffee concentrate that you then dilute with water, milk, cream, etc to make your drinks (for hot drinks, you can either mix with hot water or heat in the microwave once diluted) . Because no heat is applied, the compounds that can make coffee acidic and bitter don’t get pulled into the drink, and the taste is closer to how coffee smells. You can get cold-brew coffee makers that include a large container for brewing, filters, and a carafe for around $30-40 (this is what we have), but it’s an easy process and would lend itself pretty easily to pulling together your own system from things around the house if you were so inclined. We use ours a ton, especially for iced coffees in the summer.

Anyway, back to the topic – I also wanted to talk a bit more about the vinegars we made. I decided on two different flavors – Scarborough Fair (yep, that would be parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme) and Pesto (basil and garlic). I made the pesto with plain distilled vinegar, and put a bunch of garlic cloves and fresh basil in to soak. The Scarborough Fair was made from a mix of distilled and red wine vinegars, with a combination of dried and fresh herbs. Both of them were set up in gallon jugs and left alone to sit and infuse for about 5 weeks, then I strained out the herbs by pouring the mix through a fine mesh strainer. That worked perfectly for the fresh herbs, but the dried ones ended up with some little bits that made it through the strainer, so I popped a coffee filter into the funnel I was using to fill the bottles and got rid of the rest that way.

For some added visual appeal, I put a couple of fresh herb sprigs into the S.F. bottles, and each of the pesto bottles got one of the garlic cloves that had already been soaking in the mixture. If you’re going to do that, you want to make sure that whatever you leave in the bottle can stand up to the vinegar (the main infusing time is a good place to check this). Garlic does fine, as do the woodier herbs, but leafier ones like basil and up breaking down to a bit of a goo – which is not a problem when infusing, but would end up making the final product pretty unattractive if you put it in then. As a bonus, we have a bag of slightly basil flavored pickled garlic cloves in the fridge now, as there were more of them than bottles. Yum!