rants & recipes

Lately, I've wanted some taffy. I think it's because I see big bags of it at Trader Joe's. Since Trader Joe's brand has eggs in it, I walk right past it. Anyway, after last weekend's successful butterfinger/chocolate tempering experiment, I wanted to try some other kind of candy this weekend. So, after some trepidation about the pulling and watching an Alton Brown episode about Halloween candy, including his chocolate taffy, I decided to give it a shot.

I think it turned out pretty well. I should have halved the batch because this makes quite a bit. I gave half of the batch to Evin to share the pulling duty with me. He pulled his more than I pulled mine - mine hands were killing me - but I don't think his is significantly softer than mine, though it is a bit lighter in color. And he cut his pieces smaller than mine, which is probably better.

The final result is very chewy but when you finish a piece, there's none left stuck in your teeth or anything. The next time I make this, I may experiment with adding some cornstarch - a lot of taffy recipes call for cornstarch - and maybe cooking it a few degrees cooler. I'll also have wax paper on hand, to wrap with (though, so far, the oiled pieces haven't stuck together too bad, unwrapped, in an air tight container. And by "too bad", I mean it's possible to pry them apart.

The flavor is a dead ringer for BB Bats chocolate taffy/hard candy, though. Funny, I was just thinking about BB Bats the other day. I have strawberry powder and could try strawberry flavor taffy. Maybe next time. (A brief look-up online reveals that BB Bats have been discontinued. =(

• 2 cups sugar
• 2/3 cup Dutch processed cocoa powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup light corn syrup
• 1 tsp vinegar
• 1 1/2 tbsp vegan butter

1. Prep - Oil the sides of your stock pot. Oil silicone mat and place it in a jelly roll pan. Have ready scissors, vinyl gloves, extra fat/oil for pulling, cut squares of wax paper, if you want to individually wrap your candies.
2. Mix sugar, cocoa and salt in heavy pan. I used a 2 quart pan with a heavy bottom.
3. Add water, vinegar and corn syrup to sugar.
4. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves.
5. Clip on candy thermometer.
6. Turn up heat and bring mixture to a boil.
7. Turn heat down to low or medium-low and cook until mixture reaches 260 degrees.
8. Turn off heat, add butter, stirring to combine. Pour onto prepared silicone mat. Spread and mix in any remaining butter.
9. When mixture is cool enough to handle, put on gloves and grease them.
10. Fold mixture in half a few times, by folding over the edge of the mat.
11. Pick up candy and begin to pull, twist and fold back on itself.
12. When candy has a dull sheen, has become lighter in color and is getting stiff and difficult to pull, it's ready to be cut.
13. Shape into a log, cut in half or quarters to make pieces easier to work with.
14. Roll each piece out into a rope, about 1 inch in diameter.
15. Oil your scissors and cut into bite-size pieces.
16. Wrap with waxed paper and store in an air-tight container.

Firstly, wow, it's been such a long time since I've posted anything here. We moved to a new apartment during December, so that's most of the reason. Ironically, even one of this blog's driest spell, I've seen my blog traffic increase dramatically since about November. I thought it might be holiday traffic, with people cooking more but it's kept up, so far, through January. I can't put my finger on a source for the increased traffic but "welcome" to any new visitors and "welcome back" to everyone else!

Secondly - candy! I've been thinking about making a vegan butterfinger for a while. I found this recipe and it sounded easy enough - I just needed to find time to try it out. Finally made the time this weekend. The insides were a great success. The chocolate tempering ... I'd say it was a success - it's definitely set up much more than any I've melted, thoroughly, in the microwave and I can hold a piece of candy in my hand without it showing any signs of melting. But it's not quite a shiny as I'd like. Then again, the chocolate chips weren't to start with. Oh, and by the way, a lot of sites go on about "don't bother to temper chocolate chips" ... I used "Enjoy Life" brand vegan chips - their ingredients were chocolate liqueur, cocoa butter and sugar. Whole Foods vegan chips are similar though they do have lecithin. I'll try tempering those next time. I think some cheaper (likely non-vegan) chips will have palm kernel oil and that's why people say don't bother tempering chips. Check your ingredients - if there's no cocoa butter, then they aren't going to temper.

A few notes about preparation. I thought the peanut butter would mix easily into the hot sugar syrup. I was wrong. Next time, maybe I'll heat the peanut butter first - I think it was cooling my sugar too fast. For my jelly roll pan setup, I had a large heating pad, set on low and covered with a towel. I placed my greased pan on top of the towel, to keep the pan warm. Next time, I'll have the heating pad on high, to give me a little more working time to finish mixing and maybe continue to work the mix as suggested in the comments of the original recipe.

We used our sous vede set up for a temperature controlled water bath, to temper the chocolate. Having only tried tempering once, I'm not prepared to give any advice (except the above about chocolate chips) ... the internets can help you out with lots of information on tempering. Good luck.

• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup corn syrup
• 1/3 cup water
• 1 cup natural peanut butter (I'm sure other nut butters would work well, too)
• 1/2 to 1 pound tempered chocolate

1. Clip candy thermometer onto heavy 2 quart pot. (If you have candy pot size phobias like I do, rest assured that 2 quarts is plenty of room for this recipe.)
2. Place sugar, corn syrup and water in pot. Cook over medium high heat, stirring constantly, until sugar dissolves and all the usually jazz about sugar crystals on the sides of the pot, blah, blah, blah.
3. After sugar melts, cook mixture to 310 degrees without stirring.
4. While mixture cooks - ready workspace: grease a 12 x 17 inch jelly roll pan. Devise method to keep pan warm as described earlier. Have a butter knife and some oil on hand, for scoring your candy.
5. When sugar reaches 310 degrees, remove from heat and stir in nut butter. Be prepared to work quickly. Turn mixture out into pan and continue to mix and fold nut butter into sugar. The heated pan should give you some extra time to mix.
6. Flatten the candy to about 1/4 inch thick - not as thin as possible ... think about how much candy you'd want, when it's coated in chocolate. If you press it too thin, you're going to end up with mostly chocolate. This amount of candy in no way, will cover your entire jelly pan. Try to spread it out in the center of the pan, though - it'll be easier to dislodge with a spatula later.
7. After spreading candy, score into rectangular pieces with an oiled butter knife.
8. Cool at room temperature for at least 2 hours before coating in chocolate.
9. Original recipe called for 1 pound of chocolate to coat this amount of candy. I had quite a few pieces to lose corners and fall victim to sampling and such. So I found 1/2 pound of chocolate to be sufficient for all but about 4 pieces. The candy's quite tasty without chocolate, too.

Sometimes I think the only non-vegan foods I miss are junk-food items - Twinkies, Hostess cupcakes. And Whoppers malted milk balls. I've wanted to try my hand at something malted-milk-ball like for a while. I have a bunch of malt - annoying hygroscopic stuff that it is. I've looked online, to little avail, for homemade candy recipes. I think the real ones are made in a vacuum somehow.

But I did discover some candies - Honeycomb, Sponge, Cinder Toffee - all names for similar candies that are like puffier, airer versions of nut brittle. And often coated with chocolate.

So a while back, I tried my hand at one ... I've made brittle successfully before, but this cinder toffee was a total disaster - brunt, sticky, gross stuff that never set up. I couldn't figure out what in the world went wrong.

Well, tonight, I figured it out ... I had decided to try a small batch recipe again and I got out my thermometer, plugged in the thermocouple and it reported it was 86 degrees in here! I used it to take my temperature, it read 112. Then I realized - I was using the "bad" thermometer and our free replacement was packed away somewhere. After a brief search, we found it and its readings were good. So, last time, I'd used the bad thermometer - no wonder.

As expected, with a candy thermometer that works, my agave-comb candy turned out much better! I'll be experimenting with the recipes which call for vinegar next, and then hoping to use some malt sugar and coat in chocolate.

• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 tbsp water
• 2 tbsp agave nectar
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• a working candy thermometer!

1. Level out sugar into the bottom of a 2 quart sauce pan, fitted with your thermometer probe.
2. Add water and agave nectar
3. Sift baking soda and prepare a place for your candy. I used a silpat mat on a cookie sheet.
4. Cook candy without stirring to 300 degrees
5. Quickly remove thermometer and add baking soda, stirring with a wooden spoon to mix in soda. Be careful, it puffs up fast!
6. Pour foaming candy onto the area you prepared for it and allow it to cool undisturbed.
7. Once cool, break into pieces and store in an airtight container.

Before our cob workshop vacation, I sent Evin to the store to pick up some applesauce. He came back with regular applesauce and sweetened cinnamon spice applesauce (because that was the only organic kind they had) ... it was easy enough to use the regular, but this weekend, I sought a way to use up the cinnamon spice stuff. I found the perfect recipe online - applesauce cake!

• 2 cups applesauce (this used all 4 little containers I had on hand!)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup oil
• 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• about 1 tsp fresh, micro-planed ginger
• 1/2 cup of toasted nuts would be delicious too, but since it was a new recipe, I didn't try any.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan.
3. Mix dry ingredients.
4. In another bowl, mix sugar, oil and applesauce.
5. Add wet to dry mix, stir until combined.
6. Pour in prepared loaf pan.
7. Bake 1 hour or until done. (I totally forget to set a timer for this, so it's hard to say for sure how long I cooked it. Towards the end, I turned down my oven to 330 degrees because the edges seemed brown - I use a glass loaf pan - but it wasn't quite done.)