Christmas baking (part 2)
The second project of the day was home made candy canes (original recipe found here). This was definitely an intimidating undertaking. Neither of us had ever made candy before and the recipe stressed the importance of reading through the instructions carefully. We started by watching a few youtube videos to get a sense of the technique and then we set up the kitchen with the different stations we were going to need.
We also assembled our gloves which we would need to handle and pull the hot candy.
The ingredients we used for this was:
3 cups sugar
1 teaspoon Peppermint oil
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup light corn syrup
3/4 teaspoon food coloring
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
powdered sugar, for dusting
And then:
- Combined sugar, water, syrup, and cream of tartar. Heated until the sugar was dissolved very fine (medium heat).
- Bring to boil, but don’t stir until it reaches 280 F.
- Pour globs of mixture onto oiled sheet pans – you want a separate glob/pan for each stripe colour. We made white the prominent colour, so it was the larger portion.
- Drip 1/2 tsp of flavouring on each pile and add the colouring to the non-white portions
At this point we added the colour and flavouring to the 2 smaller blobs of candy. We found it difficult here to work with the 3 different colours and to keep them all at a similar texture because if it was out of the oven for too long it got hard and started to crystallize. So then we’d put it in the oven and work on a different section but the one in the oven would melt back to a liquid. So when we were happy with the colours of the 3 blobs we had to work quickly to lay them next to each other to try and form a log from which we would pull and twist candy canes off one end. Quickly we’d have to cut them with scissors and form in to a shape and lay them on a cookie sheet.
The first 20 or so canes turned out really well.
And as we went along, the candy would harden and we would have to place them back in the oven. Eventually this meant the colours ran together and it got harder to achieve the stripe candy cane look. But all-in-all, I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with what we were able to make!
So we are both looking forward to trying this again next year and maybe trying some new flavours and colours!
gabandkirby 
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