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| Coila Speas McCracken with her daughter Sherry |
Her talents included all of the homemaking skills, including frugality, sewing, crafts, gardening, baking, and especially candy making.
A holiday was not a holiday at our house without candy. Her confections went far beyond the traditional fudge and peanut brittle to holiday themed suckers, dozens of varieties of hand-dipped chocolates, the world finest hand-pulled After-Dinner-Mints that needed to "cure" for an unbearable week of patience and suffering before they softened to the melt-in-your mouth stage, hard tack that would shame Jolly Ranchers in flavor variety, and a myriad of other assorted culinary treasures.
Our elementary school did not provide school lunches; we packed a lunch pail or brown bag each day. Mom's homemade treats had tremendous trading value at lunch time. I remember once trading one piece of clove flavored hardtack for a package of Hostess snowballs. I would trade all the Hostess products in the world for her candy now.
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| Santa Claus Sucker Mold |
She had a fun assortment of sucker molds like this example, which were oiled and clamped tightly together before cooking the sugary mixture to the perfect hard ball stage and pouring it in and inserting a stick in the opening. Every color and flavor you could imagine was available.
At Easter, we did not need Cadbury eggs. Mom firmly filled a pan with flour and created indentations with real eggs to mold the homemade marshmallow mixture into the proper shape. These were then hand-dipped in Ghirardelli Chocolate mail-ordered from San Francisco. After the chocolate hardened, frosting was piped on to write our names, flowers, squiggles, and Easter designs and shapes.
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| Flour Molded Marshmallow Eggs |
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| Decorated Easter Eggs |
With profound awe, I am grateful for the Atonement, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, my Savior. Because of His life and sacrifice, the day will come when I can see my mother again and that will be the sweetest day of all.
