This week felt like a breath of fresh air. While we did temper and dip with chocolate, the lesson was focused on hard candy, caramels and toffee. The ingredients used are really simple, sugar, glucose, doctor, flavor and sometimes cream and butter. The challenge is in the cooking. If you are off 1-2 degrees in either direction your candy will be completely wrong. My difficulty came in making the creamy caramel. The first time, my measurements were off. The second time I cooked it to temperature (according to the recipe) it tasted terrible and the color was all wrong. The third and final time, I cooked to color rather than temperature and added cream at the end. The result, not creamy, but hard. The flavor was fantastic! Since I made a firm caramel, my team remade the creamy caramel, using a completely different cooking technique and came out with a great creamy caramel. Due to the humidity in the room, on day two we remade the toffee. It was way to sticky/soft to dip.
We used: bowls, scale, spoons, stovetop, marble slab, candy frame and candy thermometer.
We used: bowls, scale, spoons, stovetop, marble slab, candy frame and candy thermometer.