So here's the short of it, 
Today was a fun candy cooking day. 

And here's the long.

Every year at Christmas time for at least 20 years I've made chocolate sauce for the neighbors for Christmas.  It's a great, simple recipe and just a nice way to stay connected to our neighbors.  For all those years, I've had children or young adults around that I could press into service as helper elves to deliver.  Of course when they were really young, I went with them, but since this is homes only in the circle and a few on the street that leads into the circle, so by 15 years ago they had this chore on their own.  So today for the first time in a long, long time, I was the delivery person.  I'm really glad that I did that!!  I had a chance to visit with everyone that was home - some visits were short, but I had a nice chat with several of them.  Now that was a nice part of the afternoon.

This evening I made a batch of Great Aunt Ruby's Pulled Cream Candy. It's an old recipe that seems to have had it's origins in Kentucky.  Great Aunt Ruby was my Grandfather VanSant's sister, and apparently she made this candy quite frequently.  When I was in my late twenties - I don't think I know how old she would have been at that time, but this candy was legendary.  She was visiting at Mom's at the same time I was and so I got a good lesson and she gave us the recipe.  It's become a tradition to make it.  I've found several variations of the recipe (and of course it's not got Great Aunt Ruby as a part of the name).  Today I tried one of the helpful hints I'd seen.  I put the big slab of marble outside and got it really cold while the candy was on the stove top.  I didn't really think that through - the butter wouldn't spread on the marble so the candy stuck in a couple of places.  It was all good though.  And the batch turned out really well.  Now I liked having that big old hunk of marble cooled down, so maybe for my next batch, I'll butter it up good and then put it out and let it get cooled down.  -- we'll see how that works.  And -- I have a batch of candy ready to go to Atlanta!