Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen #1)(110)

1 teaspoon butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract ***

pinch of salt

8-ounce package dried apricots (or pineapple, or cherries, or whatever)

1 ? cups roughly chopped pecans (measure after chopping)



Hannah’s 2nd Note: You don’t absolutely positively have to use unsweetened chocolate squares. If you don’t have them on hand, just use three cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of 2 ? cups and it’ll work out just fine.



Chop the dried fruit into pea-sized pieces. Then chop the pecans and measure out one and a half cups. (This is easy to do if you have a food processor, but a knife and chopping board will work also.)



Chop the squares of unsweetened chocolate into chip-sized pieces. (They’ll melt faster that way.) Empty the can of sweetened condensed milk into a 2-quart saucepan. Add the unsweetened chocolate pieces and the semi-sweet chocolate chips.



Stir the mixture over low heat until the chocolate has melted. Give a final stir and take the pan from the heat.



Mix in the butter, flavor extract, salt, and the dried fruit. (Don’t add the nuts yet—they’re for later when you make the rolls.)



Put the saucepan in the refrigerator and chill the candy for 30 to 40 minutes.



Take the pan out of the refrigerator and divide the candy in half. Place each half on a two-foot-long piece of waxed paper.



Shape each half into a roll that’s approximately a foot and a half long and about 1? inches in diameter.



Roll the candy logs in the chopped nuts, coating them as evenly as you can. Press the nuts in slightly so they’ll stick to the outside of the roll.



Roll the finished logs in clean waxed paper, twist the ends closed, and place them in the refrigerator for at least two hours to harden.



Cut the candy rolls into half-inch slices with a sharp knife.



Yield: Makes about 48 slices of delicious candy.





Chapter Seven




“Good-bye, Aunt Hannah. See you later!” Tracey gave her a kiss that landed on her chin, and then she ran over to hug Lisa. Once that was done, she gave a little wave in Candy’s direction. “’Bye, Candy. It was nice meeting you.”

“Nice meeting you, too,” Candy said, giving Tracey a friendly smile. “Sorry about that fraction thing.”

“That’s okay. You didn’t know. And I didn’t know either!”

Both Candy and Tracey laughed at that, and Hannah watched her niece as she went out the back door with Janice Cox, her preschool teacher. Janice had come in to pick up some cookies she’d ordered, and she’d offered to give Tracey a ride to Kiddie Korner.

“Come on, Candy. You can help me set up the tables,” Lisa said, herding the young teenager, who claimed to be twenty, into the coffee shop. “Once that’s done, we’ll open and I’ll teach you how to go around with the coffee.”

Once they’d left, Hannah reached for the steno pad that contained the information she’d gathered about Candy, and took out her pen to make another entry. Only child? she wrote. It was clear that Candy hadn’t had much experience with preschoolers. When Tracey had offered to help Candy mix up the dough for the Chocolate Mint Softies they were serving for the Lake Eden Quilting Club’s Christmas party, Candy had handed her the recipe and asked her to measure the brown sugar.

If Hannah had heard the exchange, she would have told Tracey how much was called for in the recipe and given her the correct measuring cup. Her niece knew how to measure brown sugar. She’d helped Hannah and Lisa bake before. She could even identify the line that called for brown sugar in the list of ingredients because she could read the words brown and sugar. But the Chocolate Mint Softies called for two-thirds of a cup of brown sugar. And while Tracey knew her whole numbers up to twenty, she didn’t know her fractions yet. If Candy’d had a little sister or brother, or if she’d spent time with kids Tracey’s age, she would have known that most five-year-olds couldn’t even read yet, and it would be several more years before they understood fractions.

Once she’d stuffed the list of clues to Candy’s identity back in the bottom of her purse, Hannah began to fill the display jars. She’d just finished helping Lisa and Candy carry them out into the coffee shop when Andrea came in the back door.

“Well?” Andrea asked, breezing in without knocking. She shut the door, took several steps forward, and turned around smoothly like a model. “What do you think?”

“Gorgeous,” Hannah replied. Her comment referred to her sister’s hairstyle, an elaborate twist with feathered curls softly framing her face, and also to her outfit. Andrea was wearing a bright coral wool suit with fur around the collar. It was a color that Hannah would wear only if she wanted to help Jon Walker, the owner of the Lake Eden Neighborhood Pharmacy, sell his entire stock of sunglasses. Redheads couldn’t wear coral. It was a law. Or if it wasn’t a law, it should be.

“I think the butterscotch is good, don’t you?”

For a moment Hannah thought her sister was referring to the batch of cookies she’d taken to Bill and Mike at the sheriff’s station. Then she noticed that Andrea was holding out one foot to show off her high-heeled boots that were made from butterscotch-colored leather.