The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

"It's that time, Christmas time is here, everybody knows there's not a better time of year," (Weill). We all gather around, hot chocolate in hand, ready to sit and watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation together. My sister and I have so many little Christmas traditions together, making gingerbread houses, watching every Christmas movie imaginable, and of course baking.

For us, baking at Christmas time is a multiple day event, baking fudge, peppermint bark, cookies, chocolate cornflakes, cupcakes, and more! Each year though, at the beginning of December, my sister and I would volunteer at our Church's Christmas Bazaar, often working the bake sale. One year however, our schedules did not allow us to volunteer our time, so rather we decided to bake something to donate to the sale.

Wanting to make something really nice, I decided to make a chocolate truffle wreath. I truly had no idea what I had just signed myself up for. I had never made truffles before and it was definitely more involved than I had initially thought. I had to crush Oreo cookies using the food processor, mix it together with cream cheese, which I found out is a lot harder than it sounds, and more. Once the truffles themselves were made, I thought the hard part was behind me, turns out the hard part was just beginning.

The next step was to cover the truffles in baking chocolate. I first melted down the green baking chocolate, which was easy enough, but covering the truffles was the hard part. I dipped the first one in, only to have it come out no longer in the shape of a ball. The next was not much better, refusing to be completely covered in chocolate. My frustration quickly rose. I only had a few hours before I was going to have to take this wreath to the church. Failure was not an option at this point.

After many trial and errors, I finally figured out a way to dip the truffles into the chocolate while maintaining their shape relatively well. I quickly finished dipping the rest and set them out to dry. Once they were all dry, it was time to assemble the wreath, a whole new challenge. I began placing the truffles into a circle, but how was I supposed to "glue" them down? I finally figured out that melting more baking chocolate could be used to hold the truffles together, while still being the same color as the truffles themselves.

With each added truffle, it began to take on more of the shape of a wreath. By the time I placed the last one on it looked like a bare wreath. But, how was I going to make it look like an actual wreath? I found little red candies that could help it look more like a wreath, but the selling point was the little bow I found. I carefully placed the bow onto the wreath, making sure it was centered and straight. At this point I had already worked so hard on this wreath, I wasn't going to let a crooked bow ruin it for me now.

Once the bow was on, the wreath was complete. After hours of laboring over the placement of each truffle was complete. It had seemed so easy, I didn't know how it ended up to be so complicated, but I actually didn't mind. I knew it was for a good cause, and it was my favorite time of year, nothing could make me mad. I didn't even mind at that point that I couldn't eat any of it. I simply had one thing to say after completing the wreath; I am never making truffles again.