Rock Candy Failure:

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I feel like a rock candy failure.

Oh, I had high hopes for my project on this quiet Sunday morning. Yesterday, I finished my little drawstring bags. I want to fill them up with homemade rock candy and give them as Christmas gifts to the many lovely children on my gift list.

Oregon Gifts of Comfort and Joy ~ Kathy Matthews

I thought, oh, this will be easy. What can go wrong? I followed the instructions out of my make-stuff-at-home book. I assembled my canning jars, string and pencils. I cut the string into 6" pieces and tied them to the pencil ... three strings to each pencil, since I wanted to make these in bulk. So far, so good. Then, I got out the sugar, water, food coloring and flavoring.

I was kind of excited. Here we go!

Oregon Gifts of Comfort and Joy ~ Kathy Matthews

I made my first batch. It was purple. I was unsure which flavor to add to purple, out of the choices I had available. Black Walnut? Not sure that flavor would not make a kid gag. I decided on Vanilla. You usually can't go wrong with vanilla, can you?

Well, it was right after I poured the syrup mixture into the jar and put the pencil with three strings where they were supposed to go when I became frustrated. Everything floated on top. Oh, okay. I got a wooden skewer and tried poking everthing down. The string wasn't heavy enough to go down in a straight line and stayed in random squiggles, sometimes touching each other. I just knew they would get tangled with their rocks growing into to each other and would not turn out the nice, neat, individual candies that I had envisioned.

Hmmm. My first batch was a practice batch, of course. How could I improve this situation next time around, I wondered? I decided to soak all the other strings in hot water so they wouldn't have to soak up syrup as their only source of getting wet and hanging down straight. Then I made my lemon batch of syrup.

Oregon Gifts of Comfort and Joy ~ Kathy Matthews

The hot water soak did not help very much for weighing down the string.  So I used the wooden skewers instead. The purple one had thickened a bit, so the skewers stand up straighter. We'll see what happens. I gave up for a while. There is nothing wrong with the syrup recipe, it is just how to make a bunch of them at one time that will not stick together that I need to figure out.

Oregon Gifts of Comfort and Joy ~ Kathy Matthews

Cherry, Lemon and Vanilla


Recipe for Rock Candy:

2 cups of sugar

1 cup of water with food coloring in it

Heat on medium until the sugar is
dissolved and add 2 more cups of sugar

Add the flavoring

Pour into a nice clean jar.

You are on your own after that. I have no answers yet.   I am going to go back to what I know how to do, lay on the couch, knit a scarf for my son-in-law, and watch t.v. about murder investigations, while my best friend husband flicks through the channels in-between commercials to see what else is on. I am going to relax instead of invent.


Later:

Well, my rock candy really was not turning out. But I had used up 12 cups of sugar, and I didn't want to throw everything away. I poured the syrup mixtures into muffin pans. The lemon mix is crystallizing in aluminum foil. The vanilla and cherry mixtures are in muffin pans sprayed with butter flavor Pam (that was all I had!). There is a little bit of cherry syrup leftover, and I put it in the fridge. What a mess. At least I got a story for my blog out of it. 

Oregon Gifts of Comfort and Joy ~ Kathy Matthews

P.S. - I later learned that things would have gone more my way if I would have soaked the strings in syrup and then laid them straight put them out to dry first.  THEN the crystals would have grown.  I learned that by reading this informational but kind of startling comment:   "hahahahahahaha you are insane!! And so funny!!!! The problem with your rock candy is that you first have to dip the string in the syrup and then remove it from the syrup and let it dry straight in wax paper. That makes the string get hard and straight. Better luck next time!"

I will try it again sometime with a smaller batch, and see it that syrup trick helps.


~ Kathy M.

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