Hello folks,
I finally have some cinnamon oil and want to reproduce the buttery-cinnamon hard sweets I used to buy when I lived in Alaska. I went to my cookbook and it doesn't have a single recipe for hard-boiled sweets. I figured if I put cinnamon oil as the flavour, buttered the pan when pouring it in and then also buttered my hands as I separated the squares when they were almost set, we'd be on to a winner. Any ideas? More importantly, your favourite recipes?
-- Jo in Scotland
Check your cookbook for a barley sugar recipe. Same thing, different name. At some point in the far flung past barley might have had something to do with it, but I have never seen a recipe that calls for anything barley at all.
If your cookbook does not help, then just hit your search engine for hard candy recipes. They are all mostly very similar, boil sugar and water to hard crack, add a dab of your choice of acidifier, and pour. Some call for corn syrup which can make it almost foolproof, but you can make it without and there are plenty of recipes that do not call for it.
NightMist
The 'barley' is the name of the twist, like the furniture.
Though it was years before I realised that Barley Water WAS made with barley!
I love these old names (and recipes). I am still tossing up whether to try elderflower champagne this year. We have a bumper crop of the wretched weed, and it has to be good for something. Other than as a pigeon nightclub and brothel, that is. Sheesh!
Nel (woken again by a dawn chorus of next door's miss-sexed chickens and said pigeons!) (Gadget Queen)
I have found wonderful recipes for all sorts of "hard candy" in OLD cookbooks! Candy is almost never included in modern cookbooks, so do check the ones from the 1920 - 1940 era, and you are likely to find lots. I always make batches of all different flavors and colors for a church cookie and candy sale, and we mix it up in plastic baggies and call it "stained glass".
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