Lollipop, Lollipop

I was chatting with Nicole a few weeks ago about our favorite childhood Valentine's Day memories.  My friend's mom would make these cute and delicious lollipops flavored with cinnamon.  She would tie them up with cute wrappings and ribbons to hand out to the kids. 

We have never made hard candy and thought, how hard could it be!? We purchased some high temperature molds at Candy Mold Central.  When they came in the mail, we were thrilled with how cute the molds were. We loved the selection and the low prices. 

Yesterday, the kids had no school and we thought it would be a perfect day for candy making.  Little did we know how tricky it would be.  The first thing we learned is that it helps to....follow directions! :)

I heard that you could flavor hard candy with Kool Aid, so we mixed in some straight out of the packet.  We don't know what happened with the heat, but I think we changed some kind of compound in the sugar and flavoring...ha, ha! Oh, the smells in my house...we may or may not have set off the smoke detectors after adding Jello for flavoring and it boiled over onto the stove!  By the end of the day, we threw out 3 or 4 batches of hard candy and one batch of marshmallow.  Maybe we should have invited our candy making mother along.....

We stopped counting the amounts of lollipops that were being consumed by our kids,

 while we were busy cooking.

If you follow the directions, this HARD CANDY recipe works perfectly every time. 

 The flavoring was a little weak, maybe it just needed a teaspoon more?

They still turned out pretty! That counts for something, right?

Here's a view of the hot temp molds.  We did make the mistake of buying one candy mold that wasn't high temperature resistant and sure enough, it twisted and melted.

Nicole filled the molds as fast as she could, because the candy starts to set quickly.

The kids had so much fun helping, watching, and of course, eating.

  Just be careful with the hot boiling liquid candy, it can be dangerous to work with around kids.

We learned a lot about soft crack, hard crack...and closely following a candy thermometer.

 I guess you have to make mistakes in order to learn, right? 

What about you? 

 Have you had any luck with making hard candy?  What do you flavor your candy with?

  We would LOVE to know!

Tracy's Trinkets & Treasures shared how to take pictures on white backgrounds. We tried it out with the lollipops and love the tip.  Thanks Tracy!