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?

I just Wanna Bake - Homemade Chewy Toffee

Chewy Toffee was close at the top of my list of sweets to make, although sadly creating it did not go quite as smoothly as I'd imagined. It was in making this recipe for the first time that I realised quite how important a heavy based pan is when boiling sugar - it took me several attempts, a few different recipes and involved a trip to the bin. 

One of the things I love most about making sweets, and this is a strange one, is the research and experimenting involved when my first attempt doesn't quite go to plan, the scribbled notes all leading me towards the perfect combinations. With toffee I leaped in two feet first, hoping for the best. Now as previously mentioned this first attempt didn't go well, it was edible, it just wasn't toffee and it wasn't very nice, I had created a sort fudge/ toffee/ caramel high bred which had no chew to it whatsoever and so sadly into the bin it had to go. It was back to the recipe books, researching how to get the perfect toffee chewy-ness!! These are my top toffee making tips I discovered:

- If you want a chewy toffee cook the syrup to a temperature of between 245-275F

-If its firmer toffee's you desire cook to 320F

-Using a variety of sugars creates a more intense caramel flavour

-Do not leave the toffee's to set completely before cutting - or it's a super tricky task

-No matter how tempted you are DON'T stir the mixture when cooking

-Corn syrup = Golden syrup

Although I used a combination of recipes, my favourite one can be found here.

Ingredients:

-200ml cream (I used whipping but you can use others; single, double etc)

-165g Caster Sugar

-165g Soft Brown Sugar

-75g Unsalted Butter

-3 large Table Spoons of Golden Syrup

-1/4  Teaspoon Salt

-Vanilla Essence 

Before you start cooking, like with any recipe prepare your baking tray, line trays with parchment paper ready to pour the toffee into.

Firstly add the caster sugar and 30ml of water into your heavy based pan, melt until golden brown. Then take it off the heat and add your cream, butter, salt, brown sugar and golden syrup - place back onto boil, add your themometre to the side of then pan to keep a close eye on the toffee's rising temperature. DO NOT STIR. You don't want to cook the toffee on a super high heat or the sugar will burn, so keep it on a low-medium temperature, adjusting if you feel it's too high or might start to burn. Be patient. 

Continue cooking the mixture until you reach your desired boiling point, this will vary depending upon the texture of toffees you want. I cooked mine to 245/250F and these created a chewy toffee with a lovely texture. Then take off the heat and add in your vanilla essence. 

Pour the mixture into the prepared trays and leave to set. At this point it you wanted to add nuts of berries to your toffee's you can push them into the mixture while it's still soft and gooey, I left mine plain.

Don't leave your mixture to set completely or it'll be prove to be too hard to cut into pieces, but at the same time you don't want it to be too gooey to cut either. This really is a trial and error process, so you might want to test cutting the toffee every so often.

You can then wrap you toffee in parchment paper, creating individual sweets, and there we have it lovely chewy toffee. 

I just wanna bake - Homemade Marshmallows

I've once again been neglecting my little blog, I must stop doing this.

Recently I've found myself getting a lot more into baking, specifically the idea of making my own sweets. A few weeks ago it was my Mums birthday, and a jar of homemade marshmallows seemed like the perfect gift idea. 

After being overwhelmed by possible recipe ideas online, I picked an egg free one has I hoped this would be easier for a first attempt - you can find the recipe I used here. 

At first I was nervous that there might be a tricky process involved, but it was a lot simpler than I had imaged and I'd certainly recommend giving the recipe ago. From researching how best to make them the one overwhelming essential item for marshmallow, and sweet making in general is a sugar thermometer - this measures the temperature of the sugar when boiling. Without it, its much more guess related, and you have to rely on seeing if the sugar creates balls when dropped in water, the thermometer took out this guess work and made everything much more accurate. 

You can pretty much make the mallows to any flavour you wish - I made Vanilla, Rose and Chocolate flavours (I also added in some food colouring to turn the Rose mallows pink).

Time fly's...

It's recently come flying at me that its almost a year since my final ever university hand in, and hitting me even harder is recognising that I'm not in the position I thought I might be in a year ago. Not that I even really knew what I wanted a year ago, I just knew I wanted a rest from the deadlines and stresses that come with third year, and its fair to say this last year has given me that. I think perhaps I underestimated just how short a year is, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. 

My upcoming first anniversary for leaving uni, has made me realise just how much I'm missing being creative. It's a lot harder being self-motivated to design than I thought. Not that I've been unmotivated, its just slipped, other things have taken over and here we are, one year on, with not quite the full ideas busting out sketchbooks I would have liked. So I think its time to get back in the creative game, I love drawing and I don't want to miss out on another year of it. 

So when I reach my second anniversary of leaving I want to look back on a more productive year, and that starts with my blog; I will post more, I will draw more, more patterns will be made, more exhibitions will be visited, sketchbooks will be filled and I'll finish knitting all the socks I started!!