Christmas Candy

December 12-

Jonathan has been asking me to make caramels for 4 years, but I had never made candy before and wasn't sure I just wanted to wing it. Luckily, this year it worked out for Joan, Monica, Emily, and I to get together to get some candy made! We even had help from Grandma Truxal and Brylee while Linda and Zayden kept us company. Brylee made sure we all had aprons on, although I'm not sure they quite fit!

We started with fudge and my first rule to candy making...."don't scrape the sides." It's harder than you think because with everything else you make you scrape the sides to mix it all together. We all took turns stirring the fudge...it gets really heavy and your arm gets tired fast! That batch came out okay so we decided to move on to caramels.

The caramels were a lot of work! Just ask Emily! We each made a batch so it was nice to have the company while we stirred, and stirred, and stirred. 2 hours later we were ready to test it...we were only at a "soft-ball" stage and needed to get to a "med-hard ball". More stirring and then finally we were done. Emily and I were exhausted!

Not long after we finished, we discovered that our caramels were too hard. They were hard as a rock...not soft chewy caramels. We finally figured out that the recipe we were following was wrong and that we should have been done at the "soft-ball" stage. Opps!

Emily and I were not looking forward to doing it again so we took a break. However, Grandma Truxal loved the hard caramels and kept sneaking pieces...we all warned her to not break any teeth!!

Once we were rested, we tried again. I don't think we stirred for quite as long the second time, but it still took awhile! Although this time, we knew what we were doing! We kept sampling and it was delicious! We poured them in the pan and waited for them to set up. Grandma cut the wax paper into little pieces so that we could wrap the caramels. Even Brylee joined in for wrapping. It was quite a project and it took most of the day, but we were all really excited to have caramels!!

Fast forward to the next day...nobody could get their caramels out of the wax paper. I'm not sure if we put them in too soon or what, but they are impossible to unwrap! It was definitely a learning experience for us all!!