posted by jules.maas on Home

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Finally checking in on my blog statistics this week, I fully expected to be greeted by Mormok the blog janitor taping an eviction notice to the front door. Instead, I found my tiny halls *have* been filled with visitors. Visitors looking for really good chocolate.

Just about 60% of my December traffic have been folks who’ve stumbled onto my site as an indirect result of searches for ‘Williams-Sonoma hot chocolate’, ‘le creuset’, ‘peppermint bark’ and ‘willy wonka’.

While they may have found my year-old observations on the world of holiday retail entertaining, I’m sure they didn’t find it very helpful. And I figure that if you’re giving me traffic, you should get something for it. So here are a few Williams-Sonoma holiday pointers, and a litle treat for stopping in to see me.

Williams-Sonoma Holiday Pointers
1. Christmas merchandise hits the store the day after Thanksgiving.

2. Most of it is also online. A magical place where there are no crowds, no driving and no “we should have some if you come back in a few days”. Think about it.

3. Items you should buy AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, because they WILL sell out surprisingly early:

• Peppermint Bark (for those who like to ‘bake’, try this homemade recipe)
• Peppermint Hot Chocolate
• Peppermint Marshmallows
• Regular Marshmallows
• Chocolate Covered Peppermint Sticks
• Christmas Crackers
• Snowman plates & mugs, bowls, desert plates, ornaments, cake pan

4. Items you should buy because they are AWESOME and you’ll LOVE them and the store should have them until Christmas:

• Regular Hot Chocolate
• Hot Chocolate Pot
• Le Creuset Hot Chocolate Pot (see also, lecreuset.com)
• Peppermint Snow
• Holiday Bundt Cake pans (this year was a train, last year, Hansel & Gretel’s house)
• Mulling Spices & 5 Apple Cider

5. There is an “After-Christmas Sale“, but you won’t find many Christmas items left. It’s mostly on table linens, cookbooks, other candy varieties, select kitchen tools and electrics.

Ok, now here’s the treat.

Jules’ Secret Williams-Sonoma Recipe* for Eighteen Dollar Fudge**

Ingredients

• 1 can Williams Sonoma regular or peppermint Hot Chocolate (WSHC). Note: this recipe does not work with any other hot chocolate. Mainly because WSHC is shaved chocolate, not powder. I have no idea what you’d end up with using powdered hot chocolate in this, so if you try it, it’s all on you, baby.
• 1 can sweetened condensed milk. If you’ve never used this before, prepare yourself. It’s gross. Really gross. In fact, can anyone tell me what the hell else condensed milk is made for? Because I can’t think of a thing, and I’ve spent several fudge-making hours wondering WHY anyone would use this crap. You know, except for making killer fudge.
• Chopped Pecans or Walnuts. Alternately, if you’re like me and tend to use about as much sugary sweetness in your food & drink as one can before becoming a human pixie stick, crushed peppermint candy (aka: peppermint snow, above).
• Foil lined baking dish, preferably 8″ x 8″. But let’s be real here: anything with four sides and a bottom will do. Pie plates, bread pans, bundt cake molds – when it’s the middle of Christmas and every dish in sight is on the table, in the sink or in the fridge, I say, use what you got. It ends up the same.
• Medium saucepan
• 1 copy War & Peace

Steps:

1. Heat ‘milk’ until bubbly gooey hot (almost boiling). Pick up ‘War & Peace’. Milk will boil sometime around chapter 15.
2. Turn off burner. This point is really important. As gross as Condensed Milk seemed before, you don’t want to know what burnt Condensed Milk will do to you.
3. Dump in hot chocolate flakes and stir for your life because this cools down FAAAAST. You can turn heat back on (low!) if mixture starts to stiffen.
4. Pour and scrape every last drooly mote of fudge into your lined baking dish.
5. Put in fridge for four hours. Or until you finish War & Peace. Whichever comes first.

*I got this recipe from a Williams-Sonoma manager who got it from another Williams-Sonoma manager who worked there the year before me. So this? Practically stolen from the WS French Bakery.

**Named for my friend Nick whose fiance specifically brought to my store to sample the hot chocolate, which he did very much enjoy, but declined to buy. I think his exact words were, “WHY ON EARTH would anyone pay that much for cocoa?!”

Their gift that year was Eighteen Dollar Fudge. And now he knows.

Glimpses of Christmas

Holy crap, I was in a MALL on December 23rd. I braved traffic and crowds and screaming children and everything. The Pacific Place Mall has a show where they switch on bubble machines and blow thousands of teeny clusters around a four story mall – turning the whole place into a giant snowglobe. It’s really quite pretty. But of course I didn’t get any pictures of that.

Look! You can see the the Chihuly Tree in this one:

Trav, Jerry & Steph take a break from The Shopping! Just look at all The Shopping!

Mali attempts to hold a very serious meeting on the subject of plate clearing.

Here we have The Cat, Getting High. Taken by the Wife, Already Drunk.

Finally, here is the one thing I’ve been wanting to show you the entire post, because OH MY GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE TRAV GOT ME THIS BECAUSE DOESN’T THE MAN REMEMBER ALL THE JEWELRY I’VE LOST AND NOW HOW CAN I EVER WEAR IT BECAUSE GAH! I’LL LOSE IT!

No, I’m not telling you what was in there. Yes, I did rewrap the entire thing. And yes, I will be keeping this empty box, paper and ribbon on my nightstand, forever, UNTIL I DIE.

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