Revive25 in 2025: Recipes

I loved baking when I was growing up. When I left home, I wrote recipes in a school notebook, then later on cards I had in a recipe binder. I often made those cookies at Christmas time. 

One of them was for mint patties. I used to love rolling out the dough, cutting them in circles and then dipping them in a waxy chocolate sauce. Years ago, my husband saw me make them and questioned putting wax in the chocolate. Paraffin wax was used in vintage recipes to help set the chocolate and to make it shiny. I used to buy it in the baking aisle but he made fun because the package talked about waxing skis or making candles. There was no mention of it being edible.

I stopped finding the wax in the baking aisle and stopped making the peppermint patties. At Christmas, I researched and found a type of chocolate to use for this type of recipe. I bought the ingredients and meant to make them, but ran out of time.

With Valentine's Day coming, I thought I would revive this recipe, along with my most meaningful recipes we use to celebrate special occasions.

While decluttering years ago, I removed the recipe cards from the book sleeves and threw away the book whose sleeves had yellowed. I kept the cards together with a big paper clip not realizing how long it would take me to find a replacement book. 

Tangent: I have to add that I love black & white and purple. When we renovated our washroom, we got black and white tiles. I purchased black and white towels and added some purple ones as accents. I also had purple flowers in a vase. A few years ago, I bought tissue boxes that were black and white with purple flowers. They were perfect for my washroom. I refilled them keeping the boxes long after they were no longer in stores.

Last year, I couldn't believe my luck when I found a recipe binder that was black & white with purple flowers.

I now have this binder with beautiful paper to write or tape recipes on, so mini-project #3 for my Revive25 in 2025 was to make the peppermint patties and revive recipes from loose papers in order to have them in my binder.

This all sounded easy. I made these patties dozens of times and they were always a success but this time, it was a disaster. The dough ended up too sticky I kept adding icing sugar until I managed to roll it out and cut out the shapes.

The disaster happened with the chocolate couverture I was using. I read that this product would act like a chocolate wax mixture but it didn't. It just ran off the patties. I then thought that I could paint some chocolate on one side of the patties, but that also was terrible. I can't help but laugh looking at the photo.

They tasted like I remembered although too minty without enough chocolate to complement the patty. I managed to get a few to look acceptable, but reviving this recipe was not a culinary success. I made another childhood favourite recipe that turned out better (but still not as great as I used to make them).  

The most important thing was to collect the recipes in my binder so I could easily find them when I wanted to make them on special occasions. 

Where are your favourite recipes? Mine were found in:

• cookbooks
• in my photos app
• in emails
• in my browser bookmarks
• in digital file folders 
• loose papers
• recipe cards

I wanted to revive my favourite recipes so that they were stored in one place. One of our favourite recipes is for fried flying fish that we first tasted on our honeymoon in Barbados. I had the recipes for the fish and seasoning in my bookmarks. Realizing that the black and white paper that came with the binder would work in my printer, I decided to print the recipe directly on the paper, adding a photo I took of the ones I made on our anniversary in 2021.

Although I love the professional look of the printed recipes, handwritten ones are nice as well. I ordered photo sleeves to add to the binder for the old recipe cards I had. I can add photo memories to go with them.

Some of the recipe links I had in my bookmarks didn't work anymore. Luckily they weren't my most favourite, but it's a reminder to revive and preserve meaningful things that can disappear from the internet.

This will become a great keepsake as well. I got the inspiration from the recipe book my mom made for her grandchildren years ago. She included photos of the kids cooking, baking and eating their favourite treats along with the recipes. I actually couldn't find my copy of the mint patties to make and asked my daughter to take a photo of the recipe from her grand-maman recipe book. I'll have to borrow her book to revive more of my favourite recipes.

Add-on story: I originally wrote this blog post and recorded the vlog before Valentine's Day. I ordered a new Ticket To Ride game for Valentine's Day. When we opened it to play, I was surprised that the playing pieces were black, white and purple!