Tuesday, January 18, 2011

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!


12 comments:

  1. Never made hard candy and I'm kind of scared to after reading this post LOL

    They look super cute! I'm WAY impressed :)

    Paula

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  2. I use LorAnn Oil www.LorAnnOils.com They have tons of flavors! In the packaging is a recipe for microwave hard candy that I used last time and loved because it was so simple!

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  3. Those photos are amazing and the suckers are so pretty. I am glad you kept at it until you got it right. I love cinnamon oil for hard candy. It makes your house smell good too. Thanks for linking up!

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  4. They're sooo cute. Sorry for all you had to throw out. Sometimes things just go that way.

    Di

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  5. Funny you should ask about making hard candy... I just wrote
    A post on this very thing, yet I used my hands to mold it. Ouch.
    Come by you might enjoy the end result . Xo
    Lucy

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  6. Cute photos with the kids making the lollipops! - Jennifer

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  7. Those pictures make your suckers look like stained glass! So pretty. And freezer paper for your background, genius!

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  8. I featured one of your Vday crafts today: http://www.jcsloft.com/2011/01/diy-vday-decor.html

    Paula

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  9. I make peanut brittle which i guess is hard candy, right? LOVE it!

    yours turned out so pretty!

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  10. This post brought back memories for me too. My mom, too, made hard candy suckers when we were kids. One very early memory for me is when my mother was out working in the garden and my 4 older brothers decided to make lollipops without her. One of my brothers went up in the attic to get the molds and stepped between the rafters and moments later, his legs were dangling through the ceiling over the stove!! - Karen

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  11. I LOVE that you were willing to post that you had 'throw outs' because you didn't read and follow the directions. So many blogs just put up their pretty pictures and tell the rest of us how stupid we are. Love the cute end results. Good for you for sticking to it to get it right.

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