Peppermint Shortage

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The festive season has brought out a lot of differences here in the UK. First, we had Thanksgiving. I made appropriately themed food for two, and we enjoyed our toaster oven feast. (We have yet to use the big oven, it doesn't seem to heat well)  The best thing was, I went shopping for ingredients the day of!  It wasn't Thanksgiving for the rest of the neighborhood, so I didn't have to hunt for green beans the week before. 

Now it's Christmas season and I've already been to the pound store for decorations. I've hung lights and baubles (Pedro loves this now instead of ornaments and I'm inclined to agree) and next step is the baking.  Pedro decided on peppermint shortbread which is easy enough without a lot of baking equipment.  I just had to look up the ingredients I know and find the name for the UK equivalent.  The thing I was not expecting though, was a lack of peppermint candy. In the States, every store has candy canes and peppermint sticks and everything of the sort around Christmas.  I thought at least candy canes would be universal, but I guess not. I walked the store three times (I do this often now when looking for American items), but all the Christmas baking items were themed with treacle and mince pies. 

Finally in small section next to Werther's butterscotch, I found a bag of "clear mints".  They looked promising. Once I got home and tried one, I was excited that it did taste like peppermint and not spearmint or something else. Only trouble was I need to crush them for my recipe.  Normally, I did this with a hammer or a heavy rolling pin with no trouble since the candies were small and thin. However, these were about the size and thickness of a wine cork. 

I tried everything I had, they remained defiantly whole. After all the banging around in the kitchen, I was afraid I'd break something other than these candies.  So I pulled on my coat, intending to beat them against the sidewalk with the heaviest thing I had. Now imagine...seeing a woman haphazardly dressed outside her front door, pulverizing a small bag of whitish crystals with a can of chickpeas, desperately checking the consistency every so often. Yeah...oh well.

The cookies turned out great though. Not that Pedro would tell me otherwise after all the trouble...



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