Candy making question

Cafe Society
1

So yesterday I tried to make hard peppermint candy for a Christmas cake garnish.

The recipe was simple, sugar, corn syrup, and water. I got the stuff to 305 degrees and poured it into the pan to cool. Two problems:

  1. The red color didn’t mix in well at all. I used Wilton Candy Colors. It says it’s an oil-based color. Was this wrong?
  2. The candy that I didn’t try to color (I was going for a mix of red & white) came out a yellowish-orange color, not white.

What the heck did I do wrong? My wife thinks it might have been that I over-oiled the pot & cooling pan, but it seemed to me that the oil stayed separate and that it was actually the candy that was yellow. The corn syrup is yellowish, is there a clear variety I should have used?

2

How accurate is your thermometer? The sugar mixture may have gotten too hot and started to caramelize.

3

If you didn’t give yourself a 2.5 degree burn with molten sugar, consider yourself ahead of the game and spend 66 cents on candy canes.

(Yes, I did have a minor domestic disaster of the confectionery kind recently.)

4

IME, white candy is either colored that color, or is pulled, like taffy, to introduced a buttload of air into the matrix.

5

I’m not a candy maker, but there used to be a store around here where I would go and watch hard candy being made for hours.

The white that they used was always pulled to get it white. The sugar/water mix they made the candy out of always cooked into a faintly yellow-y colour, which didn’t matter too much when the colours were mixed in, but to get the white they had to pull it for ages.

Re: the colour not mixing in properly, could it be lack of sufficient mixing time on too cold a surface? Again at the candy store they had to spend quite a while mixing the colour into the base candy, on a specially heated table that kept it pliable whilst they were mixing it through.

6

You definitely have to pull candy to get it white. It’s been a long time since I made candy, but I remember pulling it as a kid and watching it go from icky yellow to whilte after a while and thinking it was a complete miracle.

I have no idea why the red didn’t mix in well. Might have something to do with the oil base. I’m thinking that since hard candy has no fat in it, an oil based color might not mix well with the water and sugar.

7

Sorry, I miswrote in the OP. I was actually going for clear, not white.

Interesting idea about the heating table. I wonder if the vent pipe off the oven would be warm enough?