Our Most Prized Possessions Are Our Family Memories

If your looking for my Let's Scrap Blog Hop Post you can find it here.

Kristie, a friend I met through Let's Scrap, is on the design team of Cookbookin. I joined their blog quite a while ago but hadn't had a chance to make a layout for them yet.  Then in December, Cheri O'Neill, from Let's Scrap made a fantastic sketch for them.  If you follow my blog you know that I just love Cheri's sketches.  So I decided that I would enter their sketch challenge.  
Here is Cheri's sketch

and here is my layout

     The lady in the picture is my mother.  As far back as I can remember my mother made chocolate candy at Christmas.  It was like a very sugary and sweet fudge.  After all six children grew up and had children of our own my Mother found that she really couldn't afford to buy gifts for everyone.  So each year she would make up batches of her candy and each family would get a little box filled with it.   I can't say it was the best candy/fudge I have ever tasted but biting into that sweet treat always brought back fond memories for me.
     My Mother passed away 8 years ago this month.  Just before Christmas I got thinking about her and her candy.   I thought that the recipe was long gone and I would never get the chance to ever taste it again.  But I started to make some phone calls to my sisters and learned that my youngest sister Cathy actually had my Mothers original recipe. So during our family Christmas get together she brought it down to me.  The paper was well worn with add notes on it in different color pen, but it was my Mother's handwriting.
     My Mother was an old fashioned cook and many of her recipes didn't have measurements.  Often they would say a pinch of this or a dash of that or even at times a handful of this.  In this recipe one of the ingredients was a hunk of butter. How big is a HUNK of butter?? She then had drawn an arrow from the butter down to the bottom of the page and it said - a dessert spoon heaped like an egg. Ohhh so that's a hunk of butter, then in different pen and obviously added later on it said - 2 tablespoons of butter.  Geesh she couldn't have said that in the first place. LOL
     I ended up making a batch of the candy a couple of days before Christmas.  I made some with the cocoa in it and also some without it.  I can't even explain how happy I was when I took that first bite and was whisked back to my childhood and sitting in our old kitchen watching my Mother make it.  It was just pure joy.