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Make Your Own Candy
Candy today sells at crazy prices. Many of us remember penny candy and getting pop and a chocolate bar for a quarter. Well, making your own candy is easier than you might think. Read on!
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Who doesn’t like candy? Chocolate bars, chocolates, hard or chewy candy, it’s all so good! What amazes me is how much the prices have climbed over the years. When I was little I could buy a Tab cola and a chocolate bar with my 25 cent allowance. Tab cola can’t even be found up here anymore, and that’s a tragedy. Now it’s well over a dollar for one chocolate bar and by the time I pay provincial sales taxes and federal taxes it’s even more. That’s crazy! Why, it’s enough to make you want to make your candy at home, which is what I decided to do.
Making your own candy sounds impossible at first, but that’s only because you’ve never done it. There are a few simple pieces of equipment that make it fun and easy.
The most important tool for anyone making candy is a candy thermometer. They range in price from a few dollars to over $50. Here’s the good news! The best, most accurate candy thermometer I have ever found is a simple glass tube with a clip that costs a whole $3 here in Canada. I once spent $20 on one and it was a disaster, I had terrible results and wasn’t sure why.
I’m going to share with you a very easy first time candy makers recipe. This is creamy English toffee, and a lot of it. I sell a batch of this for thirty dollars. Read the ingredient list, add it up and see how it pays to know something people just don’t generally know.
The List
1 kilo bag of brown sugar
1 pound of butter
2 cans of sweetened condensed milk,
1 1/3 cups of corn syrup
Now the hard part. Open everything and dump it in a large pot. Stir it together, turn the heat on medium and place your thermometer so that it goes in to the mix, but doesn’t touch the bottom. Stir your toffee regularly until it reaches 250-260 degrees. This will give you a chewy toffee, as opposed to a hard toffee. If you like hard toffee you can heat it longer. Remember, you can always reheat it if it is too soft when it cools, but you can’t come back from hard.
As soon as your toffee reaches the desired temperature, remove the pot from heat and pour the contents onto a large cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Let this cool and then cut into bars. I use a good pizza cutter for this.
Parchment paper is my most favourite baking and cooking tool of all. I line cookies sheets, baking pans, everything. I haven’t had to scrub a baking pan in years. I even use it for all my chocolate coating needs, placing chocolates to set. They never stick , so my chocolates are always in tact on the bottom .I buy my parchment in bulk!
If you think about it, you can make Creamy English Toffee as easily as you can make a pot of macaroni and cheese! Tell the candy man he can keep his, you can make 6 pounds for a few dollars.
Most hard candies are a cheap mix of water, sugar and corn syrup. The purpose of corn syrup is to stabilize the sugar. Some companies use other stabilizers such as honey or gum Arabic. They are all pretty equal in function, so I stick with corn syrup. Flavours should be added at the end of cooking to avoid ruining them. For some reason, and this I know, a lot of flavours don’t like to be cooked.
The best source for making your own candy can be found at http://www.more-than-chocolate.com/chocofactory.html
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