Brigadeiros Recipe (A Brazilian Chocolate)

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Last night I made brigadeiros, that yummy Brazilian chocolate that makes Brazil lovers drool. These were probably one of my top five favorite foods (yes, chocolate is a food) when I lived in Brazil. My picture seemed to garner a lot of love on Facebook, and a bit of lust, so I thought, if I can’t share the chocolates with my friends (I’m not sure how I feel about sharing chocolates) then I can at least share the recipe.

Here’s the recipe I used–I translated it from Portuguese about 7 years ago, and don’t remember where I got it from.

Brigadeiros (A Brazilian Chocolate)

1 can of sweetened condensed milk
3-4 tablespoons of cocoa
Several tablespoons butter
Chocolate sprinkles (use real milk chocolate sprinkles)

Melt the butter on the stove.  Mix in the cocoa.  Add the sweetened condensed milk.  Stir, over heat, as you bring the mixture to a low boil.  Keep stirring until the consistency changes and it becomes thick and sticky.  Remove from heat.  Let cool enough so you can touch it with your fingers, but no cooler.  Put butter on your fingers, and quickly roll the mixture into balls (of about and inch to an inch and a half diameter).  Roll the balls in chocolate sprinkles and place them in candy cups (like miniature muffin cups).  Let cool before eating.

Makes about 30.

More tricks, techniques, and pictures:

Chocolate Sprinkles

The key to this recipe is to use real chocolate sprinkles. If you go to a normal grocery store in the US and look really carefully at the label, you’ll realize that what you’re buying is not chocolate, but chocolate flavored.  Alright–okay for some things, but not ideal for brigadeiros.

My sister got me these real chocolate sprinkles from Germany–they’re 32%, which is way more than your Hershey’s bar will have.

You can also order them online, or get them at a specialty store: Pirate O’s in Draper, UT has them, as do other gourmet and foreign food stores.

Candy Cups

It’s also helpful to actually have candy cups. They’re a little smaller than mini muffin holders. See the comparison:

I bought these at a cake shop. You could use mini muffin paper cups and it’d be just fine, the risk is that you’ll make them too large, and you’ll be overwhelmed by chocolately goodness. (Okay, maybe that’s not a bad thing.)

More Pictures

Who can resist a brigadeiro close-up?

And my Brazilian doll, hoarding several brigadeiros, which are as large as her head:

Guardians of the Hearth

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For an LDS woman, being a “guardian of the hearth” is about much more than cooking food on a fire (or on the stove)–it’s about the entire spiritual responsibilities and divine roles of women in the home.

(Frederick Childe Hassam’s “The Fireplace”)

This month’s visiting teaching message is titled “Guardians of the Hearth,” quoting President Gordon B. Hinckley, who said the following in a 1995 address to women:

You are the guardians of the hearth.  You are the bearers of the children. You are they who nurture them and establish within them the habits of their lives. No other work reaches so close to divinity as does the nurturing of the sons and daughters of God.

It’s insightful to read this quote in the context of the woman and her relationship with the historic hearth. Recently, I’ve been reading the book Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light. The educational yet entertaining book spends most of its pages talking about the development of electricity and how it changed Western culture and society, but the first quarter of the book is about what life was like before electric light.

(Photo of tenant farmer and family in front of fireplace taken as part of the FSA project in 1939.)

The hearth–the fire–was often the figurative center of the home. It was used for cooking and the heat for ironing. In the evening, candles and lamps were often used sparingly, because of their expense, so the hearth was often the main source of light. It heated the home–or at least the portion of it closest to the fire. Without the other evening diversions and entertainments made possible by electric lights, families congregated in the evening around the hearth–it was a place of warmth and a place for stories and for the shared weaving of lives.

I don’t have a fireplace in my home, but I still can be the guardian of the hearth. I can be a guardian of light, of time spent together as a family, of warmth, of safety, of food, of shared stories. As a wife and mother, I am not the only one with responsibilities for the hearth–others often light and tend to our home’s fire. But I am the guardian–a guard and protector of light and spirit, one who preserves the fire and makes sure its embers do not go out.

(Helen Allingham’s “In the Nursery”)

Sarah Jane Adams: A Love Story

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I love family stories. They’re so interesting and compelling. For Valentine’s Day I wanted to publish a tale of love.

Robert Pemberton and Sarah Jane Adams

Here’s the story of one of my ancestors, Sarah Jane Adams, as told by another descendant, Bertram Adams (in the book The House of Benjamin: Ancestors and Descendants of Benjamin Adams of Boaz, 1980).

Sarah Jane Adams[,] the auburn-haired daughter of Hannah Rhinehart and her husband Benjamin Adams[,] was born 18 Oct. 1847 in Grant county, Indiana, and there grew to womanhood. On a Saturday, 25 Aug. 1866, three couples gathered in front of their school mates and friends to be married in one ceremony on the long porch of the home of Isaiah Pemberton at Back Creek, near Jonesobro, Grant co., by Alfred C. Barnard, J.P. (MC)

Robert Pemberton to Sarah Jane Adams

Charles Baldwin to Melinda Newby

Axum Newby to Hannah Pemberton

Within ten days after they were married, the three couples started their 500 mile journey to Iowa, in five covered wagons loaded with all their possessions. The young brides all cut their hair and wore bloomer suits for convenience in traveling, in spite of numerous unfavorable comments. No incidents of the 23 days of travel to Hartland, Iowa have been recorded, except for some rainy days at the beginning.

Hartland, in Marshall co. Iowa, was a Quaker community, and some of the Quaker Pembertons had already settled in that vicinity. Since Robert and Sarah Jane had been married out of the Quaker Church, the Quakers objected and were about to “church” Robert, but his wife quietly converted and all was peace. She remained a staunch and faithful member until the end of her days. (141)

I love that Sarah Jane had auburn hair. Apparently, she was also a “small woman, not over five feet tow inches tall and quite slender; she had light complexion with blue or grey eyes; there was no silver in her curly dark auburn hair until shortly before her death.” Her husband “was a tall bearded man and some said he much resembled General Robert E. Lee” (142).

Sarah and Robert had 9 children; their first and third children died as infants.

(Their 9 children, in birth order, were Orilla, Tacy Jane, William R. (or H), Charles Benjamin, Perle C., Jeannette, Delbert H., Myrtella, and Wynn Robert. I have no idea who is who in the picture.)

Sarah Jane Adams Pemberton was a widow for the last 28 years of her life. She lived in West Los Angeles: 11567 Santa Monica Boulevard. At her death, on February 19, 1940, she was 92 years old.

When I get the chance, I’ll upload a copy of a note that she wrote, with her signature.

Cutting off your hair and wearing bloomers to move across the country, making sacrifices to make things work, having 9 children and living faithfully together for your entire lives–if that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

The Compulsion to Take your Own Piece of a Place: A Visit to Las Vegas

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I remember going on vacations with my parents and younger siblings to historical sites–Gettysburg, Bunker Hill, Nauvoo, and others. I would always want to take something with me, like a rock from Gettysburg. I wanted something tangible, substantial, something that would create resonance and connection to the place and its events even when I was gone. My parents would tell me that if everyone took a rock from Gettysburg there would no be no rocks left. Thus, the invention of the souvenir shop: you can take something that feels significant and create connection even though whatever it is you bought was probably made in China. The place is preserved, the economy is stimulated, and you go home happy.

I went to Las Vegas a few weeks ago to see Phantom of the Opera, and even though I’m not a Vegas type of girl (I don’t gamble, drink, or go to “adult entertainment”), when touring I still wanted to bring something back with me. I really didn’t buy anything, besides a bottle of water. But I did bring something back with me: videos. Yes, I know, I could search on YouTube and there are plenty of videos of Las Vegas. And there are movies, like Ocean’s 11, that memorialize it. But just as you want your own rock or your own t-shirt, I wanted my own videos.

First, the Venetian was all decked out for the Chinese New Year, so I had to get a shot of a dragon I  saw:

Second, I loved the fountain show at the Bellagio, so I cut together a few of my favorite parts:

Pictures and video are the new thing to take away from a place. We take them, trying to personally capture a location’s essence. Especially in the 18th century, and continuing on today, there were fears that perhaps photography could actually steal a piece of someone’s soul, or at least damage it. It’s an interesting thought, because we do change our experiences of things by mediating them.

Here’s a few books that I’ve enjoyed on the history and theories of photography and film that consider how the camera has changed our lives:

In truth, that’s my personally collected bibliography of cool film and photography books. I am officially a geek.

Manipulating People When They Try To Unsubscribe

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You know the drill–once upon a time you thought it would be interesting to get a company’s regular (monthly, weekly, or, heaven forbid, daily) emails. Or, more likely, you entered a contest, completed an online quiz, or got a special offer on a purchase and did not read every word of fine print. Sometimes, this turned out to be a good relationship–I don’t mind Amazon’s book recommendations or Winkflash’s photo book sales, for example, and I’ve been getting them for years. But most of the time, at some point you’ve had enough. You’re ready to unsubscribe.

You’ve made your decision. You go into their most recent email, click the unsubscribe button, and then are taken to a special webpage, designed not to help you unsubscribe, but to convince you not to. Here’s a fairly standard message:

Retention is important for companies, and they want you to stay on their email list for as long as possible. This is the standard message to get you to stay: you will lose something by leaving us. We like you, you like us. Please don’t leave. It’s like a needy boyfriend that you never meant to say “yes” to, standing next to your middle school locker.

Other companies are a little more heavy-handed. Let’s give a little background first–I once took a quiz on RealAge to find out, well, my “real age.” I got on their email list, and never actually read a single email. In unsubscribed from them in 2010, and spent 2 years of bliss, enjoying my slightly-less-cluttered inbox. At the beginning of 2012, they re-injected my email into their system, and started me sending emails again. (Note: they are not the only company that recycles their unsubscribed customers, a practice I disagree with. I’ve also had to unsubscribe twice from KOA.)

Here’s the message I got from RealAge when I attempted to unsubscribe (the second time):

Same argument as the first, but heavy-handed and even manipulative. But don’t worry–I held on to my original plan to unsubscribe, clicked the necessary buttons, and (probably) managed to be removed from their email list. Of course, it may take up to 10 days for my request to be processed–a standard caveat. It would have been easier to mark them as spam, and next time I will.

The thing is, they wouldn’t make these arguments to get people to stay unless they worked a healthy percentage of the time.

I’ve also gotten these email when I’m not as connected to my social networks as they’d like me to be–unless you change the settings, Facebook now emails you with what you missed if you don’t log on regularly, and Twitter is rather concerned that I haven’t tweeted since June 30th (I’m not sure whether it was of last year, or the year before). Here’s the email they sent me:

The assumption is that there is something lacking in my life–or if I don’t feel like something is lacking, it’s only because I don’t realize what I’m missing. Each of these companies–RealAge, KOA, Twitter, and many more–believes that they can feel that gap, that I will feel happy and whole only through them. They all have things to offer, and maybe some day I will go back to Twitter or camp at a KOA. I find fulfillment through blogging and through interacting with my friends on Facebook. But if I’m relying on email subscriptions or social networks to make me whole, then something obviously is lacking, something that the Internet can’t solve. Perhaps there’s a big “Unsubscribe from the Web” button–I need it sometimes.