It’s not quite the same as Martha Stewart teaching party hosts how to prepare a standing rib roast for 20, but a new instructional video wants to show you how to make proper chocolate Hanukkah gelt.
In the latest installment in Vice’sMunchies series, comedian Eliot Glazer celebrated the Festival of Lights with a simple approach to making candy gelt. (Gelt, if you were unaware, are faux coins that, for reasons lost to history, form part of the Hanukkah tradition along with menorahs and dreidels.)
This is so much more than a how-to video. The lead-in to Glazer's bit—where chocolate-making is just a cover for snarky joke-telling—is set at Sammy’s Romanian Steak House in New York with a holiday party hosted by Israeli singer/actor Dani Luv. Luv, who resembles Larry Fine from the Three Stooges, croons and banters a bit with the audience before tossing it over to Glazer.
“I'm a Jew for the food,” declares Glazer at the outset of the clip. He then proceeds to melt chocolate in a double boiler and sloppily pour it into a muffin tin of sorts. After cooling, he dusts the little nuggets with edible gold dust. The result is gelt, prepared quickly, simply, and irreverently.
Glazer, decked out in a shirt covered with images of friendly giraffes, lets his wit take center stage. While painting his chocolate treats with gold, he quips, “Think of yourself as Bob Ross with a bigger afro.” He rambles on about his Bar Mitzvah and other highlights of his awkward religious upbringing, ending with a hit-and-miss attempt at chanting the blessing over the holiday lights.
This installment appears to be the first in a series that Munchies calls its Hanukkah Spectacular. Let’s hope future installments teach us how to turn Tater Tots into latkes and how to find the best Chinese food on Christmas Day.
Screengrab via Munchies/YouTube