Food

Daring Bakers – Candylicious!

Now this month’s Daring Bakers’ challenge was right up my alley. I’m by no means a master chocolatier or confectioner but I do enjoy playing around with sugar. I was about eight when I found a recipe in my mother’s microwave cookbook for toffee and took great delight in making enormous batches of the stuff to hand around to school friends. I was very popular for a while. More importantly however, I got an early lesson in how sugar worked. I knew what happened when I hadn’t cooked sugar long enough or for too long (oh what a mess…). I also learnt how freakin’ hot sugar can get and to avoid contact at all cost.

Chocolate handling (at least the tempering part) is still a fairly new to me. I understood the importance of tempering but that didn’t stop me from melting up chocolate for basic kids’ party desserts and coating things liberally as is. Sure, the chocolate was squishy and dull looking but it still tasted pretty good. When I finally got around to tempering chocolate, I realised its importance, particularly when you want to handle pieces individually (fingerprints aren’t a good look) and you can’t beat that satisfying snap when you bite into chocolate.

So, it was with great excitement that I tackled this challenge which was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?! Both ladies make some pretty amazing things and their candies really set the benchmark sky high. It was time to get into Kitchen Stadium and do my worst. Over three days I made: chocolate coated honeycomb, strawberry truffles, cherry marzipan bonbons, bitter caramel bonbons and strawberry & kiwi pate de fruit.

My first candy was honeycomb (also called sponge candy, it contains no honey so a good vegan treat). This was something I’d always been interested in making so I really welcomed the recipe provided. Very easy to follow and I know I’ll be making more for special occasions. You can find the recipe on Lisa’s blog and I urge people to go to the effort of finding Karo corn syrup (light or dark, or both). It is the best thing for candy making although glucose comes a close second. I used 1/3 light and 2/3 dark corn syrup as I was after a caramel-y candy and I even used a drop or two of French caramel extract to really bring out the flavour.

The recipe makes a ship load of honeycomb so unless you love the stuff more than life itself, halve the ingredients. Don’t be alarmed by the billowing candy that results before it cools down and shrinks, but ensure that you do have the correct vessels and a lot of space to work in. Once set and cooled, I broke the honeycomb up roughly and coated some in tempered milk chocolate. Not wanting to waste the chocolate that coated the inside of my Thermomix bowl, I threw some pieces of honeycomb in and gave it a quick blitz. I now have a batch of crushed chocolate honeycomb to use for ice cream topping.

My next candies involved home dried fruit. I made a batch of dried cherries and strawberries which I then soaked in a pomegranate liquer and sugar. This rehydrates the fruit a little so it’s more pleasant on the tooth, and the slight alcoholic kick isn’t too bad either! With the strawberries, I chopped them up quite finely and added them to a white chocolate ganache. I rolled the chilled ganache into truffle balls and dipped them into tempered milk chocolate. With the cherries, I wrapped them in marzipan and dipped the lot into tempered dark chocolate.

I used my Thermomix to help with the chocolate tempering. I know it has got a reputation as a super kitchen machine that does everything but I should note here that it doesn’t actually temper chocolate on its own. It does make the process a touch easier (stirs the chocolate for you while bringing it to 47-50C, no more) but you are still essentially following the seeding method and will need a thermometer to ensure that you get your chocolate to the precise temperature required. For instructions on tempering chocolate with the TMX, please click here.

I actually liked the marzipan balls more than my strawberry ganache candy but I blame that on buying (ahem) not particularly good quality white chocolate. It was just too sweet. I wanted to use a more generic brand because I find both Lindt and Green & Black’s white chocolates too distinctive in flavour and I wanted my strawberries to stand out. What a mistake! I’ll use a good quality white chocolate next time that has a relatively neutral taste.

I then moved on to my filled bonbon which I kinda winged in the end. I have never used oil based colours for chocolate making before but heck, isn’t Daring Bakers all about experimenting? I chose a violet colour and liberally threw some into my chocolate mould (literally…). I wasn’t too creative that day so decided to go with a caramel filling. Unfortunately, I let the caramel set a little too hard (I like the slightly bitter taste of burnt caramel) and I was also worried I had the caramel too far up the bitter scale but once it was nestled into some Green & Black’s milk chocolate, it was a marriage made in heaven. The sweet milk chocolate took the edge of the bitter caramel but stopped the whole thing from becoming a sickly sweet affair. Dark chocolate would not have been right for this caramel.

Finally, we revisited the making of jellies which I had some moderate success with last year but not nearly enough to crown myself the queen of jelled candy making just yet. It would also help if we had a ready supply of liquid pectin in Perth but Jamsetta is about the best we’ve got and it’s got a rather odd flavour to it :( I chose to make strawberry and kiwi Pate de Fruit and while it may be more accurate to call the result a slightly solid jam, it held its shape well enough to pass as a soft Pate de Fruits. Back to the drawing board once I get hold of some plain pectin.

A huge thanks to the hosts for this wonderful challenge :) I had so much fun and I’m inspired to practice more and offer up homemade candies as gifts :)