Hard candy is the perfect long-lasting treat for children and adults alike. In cases when blood sugar is running low, having a piece of hard candy around can do wonders in stabilizing your condition.
However, hard candy is not always the best kind of snack because of its high sugar and caloric content. To some extent, you can minimize the health risk by making your own hard candy at home. Below are some guidelines for going about it:
- Collect the ingredients. These would be 3.75 cups of white sugar, 1 cup water, 1 tablespoon flavored extracts (any kind you like), 0.5 teaspoons optional food coloring, and 1.5 cups light corn syrup. For during the finished product, you may also want to have a quarter cup of confectioner’s sugar on hand.
- Combine the syrup, water, and white sugar in a saucepan. The saucepan should be of medium size. Melt this mixture on medium heat, making sure to stir it in order to avoid burning the sugar. Once the mixture boils, stop stirring.
- Heat the candy mixture to 300-310 degrees Fahrenheit or 149-154 degrees Celsius. You can use a candy thermometer for this. If you don’t have one, put some cold water in a glass and drop a little bit of the hot mixture into it. If the mixture forms hard threads, it’s at the right temperature.
- Remove the saucepan from the heat and add the colorings and extracts.
- Pour the whole thing on a greased sheet of baking paper. Dust it with the confectioner’s sugar.
- Let the mixture cool, and break it up. You can make this cooled sheet into pieces large enough for sucking on, or crush it into crystals for decoration purposes.
- You can also store your candy in order to make it portable. Airtight jar and boxes are ideal for this purpose since they prevent the candy from getting too soft in wet and humid weather. The proper packing is also necessary in order to keep ants and animals away from the sweetness.
- Alternatively, you may want to use wholesale candy boxes +Generic for packaging your candy in an attractive manner. You can then distribute it to various locations for business purposes.
Additional Tip
The turning point for any kind of candy making is the exact right temperature. This is where a novice candy maker is most likely to go wrong. It is hence highly recommended that if you want to make candy at home, invest in a candy thermometer. This would enable you to exactly measure the temperature of your candy mixture without resorting to the old-timey hard-ball/soft-ball methods.
For different kinds of flavors, you can have several food colorings and extracts on hand. Pour them in when the candy mixture is still liquid. You can even choose to make different kinds of flavors and colors from the same candy batch. Simply pour the hard candy mixture into separate pans while it is still hot. However, you would have to be quick here in order to avoid letting the mixture cool in the pans themselves.
This recipe takes around 45 minutes to prepare from start to finish. It yields a total of 36 servings, each of which has 124 calories each.
Conclusion
Making your own hard candy may take some practice, but it’s worth trying out. Once you get into practice, you can even make a decent amount of cash by turning your newfound skill into a business. If nothing else, you would have a homemade treat for the road which would surely be much appreciated by everyone around you.