[Sca-cooks] Hard Candy was Once again venturing blindly so I need help.

[Nelson Beth]

Okay, maybe this is silly cause I'm the only one who
thinks hard candy stays hard, however...

Be careful once you make the candy to keep it cool.
My mom and I make stained glass candy every couple of
years for Christmas presents.  Since I always make it
in the winter I never thought about my candy melting.
Then I made the Pennsic wedding cake.  I wanted melted
hard candy for the jewels.  So I found jewel shaped
hard candy molds and Mom and I spent the day making
candy in July.  Instead of leaving the candy at Mom's
house I took it to work and left it in the car (with
the window shades up).  When I got out of work I found
the candy had melted just enough to ruin the shapes.
DOH!

So I made a 2nd batch of candy.  The molds came with
the directions to use PAM on the molds between every
few batches.  I didn't have PAM so I thought "I'll
just use veggie oil it's the same thing."  Needless to
say, I couldn't get the candy out of the molds.  Since
I had found that microwaving the candy does a good job
of keeping it liquid enough to pour into the molds (15
seconds on high between every 2 trays) I stuck one of
the trays into the nuker and ended up burning the
sugar and killing one of my molds.  Then I just tried
boiling the molds in water to get the candy out, which
worked.

So I get to the 2nd weekend of Pennsic and it's time
to make the cake and I haven't finished the bloody
hard candy.  After Tirzah and I spent basically an
"all-weekender" we had finished cakes complete with
hard candy.  Yay!  We put the cake in the car and
Tirzah drove with the air conditioning on high the 5
hours to Pennsic.  Then we got the Coopers to store
the cake in their refrigerated trailer.  When we
inspected the cake for damage we found the hard
candies had melted just enough to make cabashons (sp?)
instead of faceted stones.  Tirzah said "see, you
didn't want faceted stones and now you don't have
them".

I had left the left over hard candy on the counter in
the kitchen where we had made the cakes figuring I
would use them to make a cake for Storvik's Post
Pennsic Revel the Saturday after Pennsic.  Then not
thinking about it I turned off the air conditioning in
the house (since no one would be there for a week).
When I got back all the candy had melted!  So after 7
batches of candy made (2 blue, 2 red and 3 green) I
ended up getting to use 36 pieces of candy (each batch
made somewhere around 140 pieces - yes I am stubborn).


Moral of the story, stained glass candy melts at much
lower temps then you would think.

>
>But of course there is another question...
>Ok How solid is that 310 degrees? I ask this because
>I had some pretty candy at about 250 degrees and it
>was solidifiing rather well in cold water.  So rather
>than running the risk of burning it would it be
better
>to go with the lower temp?

>Nichola



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