I Just Wanna Bake - Homemade Candy Canes

Now I know what your thinking, Candy Canes in January surely not, and you would be correct - this is a very much delayed recipe post from one of my Christmas creations. 

With my recently discovered passion for baking sweets, I decided what better presents to give my lovely jubbley fam for Christmas than some home made goodness. So I set about writing a list of sweets to bake them, and the one flashing at me, surrounded by ding-ding-ding bulbs, screaming Christmas was of cause the candy cane. 

I thought to myself when starting out with this recipe, sure, candy canes, can't be that hard, right? wrong. It wasn't so much the boiling process involved, it was the process afterwards, twisting together two pieces of super hot minted sugar and bending into a candy cane turned out to much more tricky than I'd imagined. I'll try to talk through that aspect of the process in more detail so you'll be more aware if you attempt to make them. Although I have to confess in the end (due to a lack in varieties of food colouring) I turned my canes into mint sweets, and the remainder I used in next weeks recipe: Pepper Mint Bark.

Ingredients:
- 400g granulated sugar
- 120ml golden syrup
- 120ml water
-1/4 teaspoon cream of tarter
-peppermint essence 

Combine the sugar, water, golden syrup and heat in a heavy based pan until they are all dissolved! Bring the mixture to the boil and add the cream of tarter, you'll then want to boil the mixture rapidly until it reaches the hard crack stage. 

You'll now want to half your mixture, pouring  it in half, into two greased dishes, add a few drops of peppermint essence to each and food colouring. You can add any colour you wish, I used red and left the other without has I only had one colour, but I'd recommend using two. (Sadly I couldn't find anywhere that sold white food colouring, so my canes weren't very traditional)

Here comes the tricky bits. With your food colouring and flavouring added you need to sort of kneed the gloops of sugar, I used a metal spatular for help, has the sugar was super hot it was so so tricky. Now pull a piece off of each gloop and try to create long rope like lengths of each, with your two lengths ready, try to twist them together - wrapping them around each other. When the twisting is complete mould into the shape of a candy cane. You will notice that the mixture starts to harden the longer it is left, in order to loosen it and make it more mouldable you can place it in the oven, not too hot though it'll go back to a liquid form. 

I hope this made some form of sense. Perhaps rubber gloves might help with avoiding burning your hands when handling the sugar?