Christmas Candy Making

It was soo nice to be home!! The trip was too short, as always, but it was jam packed! I come from a family of cooks, so of course, we cooked when I was home. My Aunt recently moved to Reno to be with my mom and my grandma, so this year, she decided we should make candy. Everyone has ways they get into the holiday spirit, usually I make cookies - but being so far from family, it's somewhat hard to get in the mood to make them. Also, I really don't know much about candy making, so I was excited. One of the things my mom and I were interested in was making fondant - you know, that stuff that covers fancy cakes? Apparently it also is the covering for chocolate covered cherries and the center of peppermint patties. Well it starts out like this:

Cook sugar, butter and corn syrup until soft ball stage. Pour onto a buttered sheet pan to cool.

Once the sugar is cool enough to the touch, it needs to be worked....a lot. Through agitation and mixing of air, there is a chemical reaction where the sugar crystallizes from a gooey mess to an opaque, mold-able candy. You can feel it happening - it turns really hot all of a sudden - so an exothermic reaction.

Next, on to make those chocolate covered cherries. First you start with a mess of maraschino cherries.

Then you cover each cherry with some fondant. You have to make sure that you cover the whole cherry, to seal in the juices.

Let the fondant on the cherries dry - or lose the tackiness.

While we were waiting for the cherries to dry, we made peppermint patties with the other batch of fondant.

Once everything is dry, it's time to dip in chocolate! With the cherries, make sure you cover the stem up a good way to seal in all the juices.

A tray of finished cherries. So I was not aware that the cream the surrounds the cherry starts as fondant. When I asked my aunt how long it takes for the fondant to liquefy, she said "I don't know, they have never lasted that long!!" Oh family.

We had tons of things to dip! It was a great day, with 3 generations of Hoper girls learning a lost art.

We put everything out in the garage for the chocolate to set.

Now what to do with all those candies? Why give them away of course! We ended up making chocolate covered orange cremes, chocolate covered chocolate mint cremes, peppermint patties, chocolate covered caramels, peanut-cranberry clusters, divinity, and chocolate covered cherries. What a great day!