Looking for a recipe from the past for your Cadette New Cuisines badge? Or a holiday candy recipe you can easily make with your Girl Scout troop at Christmastime? Check out this 1950s recipe for holiday candy 5 ways.

I found this recipe in an ad in a 1957 issue of Girl Scout leader magazine.

For easier printing, here is the ad text:

Making Holiday Candy

Easy to do. Not even any cooking. 5 different kinds: Chocolate Cherries – Puddings – Crunchies – Peanut Butter – Cherry Almonds

Easy how-to-do-it:

• Ingredients:
• 2 lbs. semi-sweet chocolate
• 6 oz. maraschino cherries
• 1/2 cup hard sauce
• 1/2 can flaky coconut
• 3 oz. crunchy peanut butter
• Can of chopped, roasted almonds
• 2 slices fruit cake 1/2 inch thick
• Cherries
• Blanched almonds

Directions:

Prepare centers on wax paper:

For chocolate cherries: Drain maraschino cherries, roll one by one in teaspoon of hard sauce; then in coconut.

For peanut butter centers: Make balls, each 1 teaspoon of peanut butter; roll in chopped almonds.

For puddings: Cut fruitcake in 1/2-inch squares.

Coat: Stir to merely melt chocolate in bowl over hot water. Don’t let chocolate get hotter than 80 degrees F. Never let water touch bowl or chocolate. Use fork to dip centers one by one. Life on fork; push with second fork onto wax paper. Trim.

Crunchies: Leftover ingredients or raising, cornflakes, etc., stirred into leftover melted chocolate. Drop by teaspoonful.

What is Hard Sauce?

Hard sauce is something I had to look up. Pioneer Woman describes hard sauce as:

Hard sauce is a soft, spoonable topping meant to be plopped onto the top of warm (and the “warm” part is important) desserts like pies, pudding, cobblers, and crisps. It has a butter base, so when it hits the warm dessert, it takes its own sweet time melting and running down the sides of whatever the dessert happens to be. It’s absolutely out of this world.

This decadent concoction is usually seen around the holidays for one important reason: it contains booze. Glorious, flavorful booze.

Now, I did take a look at her recipe. And after 2 cups of ingredients, there is 2 tablespoons of whiskey “more or less to taste,” it stands to reason that the actual alcohol content is pretty low when the entire candy recipe calls for 1/2 cup of hard sauce.

However, if you’re cooking with Girl Scouts, you might not want to get into cooking with alcohol.

We could adapt Pioneer Woman’s hard sauce recipe to replace the whisky with vanilla or another flavoring. Therefore, you would mix the following