The Fickle Hobbyist

As I was planning for Abigail’s dessert table, I knew I had to have little Eiffel Tower lollipops.  I searched around and found these ones at Amazon

They were exactly what I wanted!  I also ordered some purple and white candy melts to make chocolate ones.

Last night I tried my hand at some old fashioned lollipops.  I knew I wanted a recipe that didn’t use corn syrup, because we really try to stay away from the stuff around here.  Luckily I found THIS recipe on the Food Network.  I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical as to how these would turn out; after all, they only had 3 ingredients, but I have to say they are REALLY good!

You’ll need 2 cups of sugar, 2/3 cup of water, and 1/4 tsp of cream of tartar.  Add all three to a heavy bottomed pot and stir over medium high heat until the sugar dissolves.

When it’s all dissolved, turn the heat up to high and let it boil without stirring until the temp reaches hard ball stage.  (between 300-310)

Have a cookie sheet prepared with your lollipop sticks so that when you get to this point you can pour out the candy.  You can leave it untouched if you’d like, or if you want to, add a color and/or flavoring at this stage.  I chose to put some purple food coloring in the first batch.

I then poured the candy into the molds and whatever left over I had I poured out onto my marble slab.

This is the color of the first batch which I loved!

Here are the towers waiting to harden.

Now, they look great right?  Well, they were SUPER hard to get out.  Duh, I forgot to grease the molds.  ACK!  So this batch didn’t work out.  Go figure.  Oh well, round two.

I did the same thing I did before, but I also decided to add some cherry flavor to it.

Unfortunately this has a red color to it, so when I added the purple, it turned the whole thing brown.  Not a big deal, though.  The real Eiffel Tower is brown anyway.

This time I remembered to grease the molds!!  It made it much easier to remove them.  I love them!!  Sure, they’re brown, but whatevs.  They look awesome and taste great!!

I think these are going to look great on the dessert table!  Especially paired with the white and purple chocolate ones.  I can’t wait!

Have you ever tried your hand at candy making?  Do you love it?  Would you give something like this super simple recipe a try with your kids?  I bet they’d love it on a “boring” summer day.

-Autumn

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