Chocolate Hard Candy

Hello, everyone! If you like chocolate and you like hard candies, then this candy is for you! This is actually a taffy experiment gone brittle (and tasty!). Every time I make taffy it either turns out too gooey or too hard or too sticky, but the temperature I use isn't varying much (that's what you get for buying the cheapest candy thermometer you could find, dummy)! At least this attempt produced something edible and good for getting that supper after-taste out.

Step 1: Ingredients and Utensils

Here are a few things you'll need.

Ingredients:
1 cup of Granulated Sugar
2 tbs. of Cocoa Powder
1 tbs. of Cornstarch
1 tbs. of Unsalted Butter (plus some for non-sticking the pan)
2/3 cup of Corn Syrup
1/2 cup of water
1/4 ts. Salt
Powdered Sugar for de-sticking
Vanilla Extract to taste

Utensils:
Medium-small sauce pan
Wooden Spoon (preferably with a long handle)
Candy Thermometer
Small Glass Casserole Dish
Cutting Board
Food-Safe Gloves
Kitchen Scissors
Meat Tenderizer
Wax Paper


Yields about 25 candies.

Step 2: Mixing the Ingredients

First mix the dry ingredients together inside the sauce pan, then add the wet ingredients. Mixing the dry ingredients first insures that everything blends well. Also, butter your casserole dish.

Step 3: Heat and Stir

Next, on a medium-high heat, mix everything together well. When the mixture fizzes up, turn the heat down a bit and continue to stir. After the temperature reaches about 210°f, the temperature might 'stick' a bit, but once it starts moving again, it will move pretty fast, so you have to keep an eye on it while it's cooking.

Step 4: Cooling

Once the mixture reaches the hard ball marker on your candy thermometer, pour it into the buttered casserole dish (always use oven mitts while handling hot pots and pans!). Pour a bit of vanilla extract over the candy and mix it in with a spoon. Next, pour some powdered sugar over the top of the candy and put it in the refrigerator to cool. Don't let it cool too long, or else you won't be able to take the candy out of the dish. For best results, take it out of the 'fridge while still warm.

Step 5: Pulling, Cutting, and Wrapping

If the taffy is still too hot to handle, use a meat tenderizer to push it around the dish and keep it from hardening. When it is cool enough to handle, form a ball with the candy and pull it like taffy a few times. Once it has firmed up a little bit, make a rope with the candy and use kitchen scissors to cut it into pieces. Wrap the pieces with wax paper and enjoy! These candies have a flavor similar to tootsie rolls and a consistency similar to hard candy, but after you suck on it for a while, it becomes slightly malleable. It is a great treat for hard candy and chocolate fans!

Edit: I've found that if you let the candies sit for about a week (assuming that they last that long), they soften a little and get like those soft mint candies.

WARNING!!! When I was pulling the candy, I seared some of my skin off, so use caution when handling hot candy, or, better yet, don't handle hot candy.

Comments

[Pete Zelchenko]

Very nice! It's rare to see firm/hard chocolate candy recipes! These are indeed basically Tootsie Rolls. A little harder and you would have true chocolate hard candy, but I think that due to the solids (cocoa doesn't dissolve!) it might require you to take it up to or past the hard-crack heat range (close to carmelization, then next stage is burnt sugar). That's tricky and calls for experimentation to get the timing right.

The reason your candies turned "grainy" like mints after a week is probably because the sugar recrystallized over that time. Even a small amount of unmelted crystalline sugar can start the process of molten sugar next to it. If all of your candy was grainy, that probably means the sugar never fully dissolved. Sure, it melted, but once it turned fully back from liquid to solid again, the crystals re-formed. Still tastes delicious, but if you want to avoid that and keep it smooth indefinitely, you might first have to first dissolve the granulated (i.e., crystalline) sugar fully and make a syrup of it. That's probably one reason a lot of candy recipes call for (already fully melted) corn syrup. Corn syrup is nothing more than dissolved corn sugars, just the same as a sugar syrup.

[datadoll]

Awesome!

[aartcritique]

Thank you for commenting! If you make them, I'd love to see!

[astropapi1]

Oh dear, I'm drooling all over the place. These look just like the candies my grandma used to give me when I visited her! Definitely going to try these out once I get my hands on a candy thermometer.

[aartcritique]

Sorry for taking so long to reply. I had a cold. Here's a tip: don't get the first candy thermometer you find. Cheap thermometers tend to stick. When they get going again, they go so fast, that you don't realize you're over the temperature until it's too late.