Christmas Candy Catastrophe

Of all the tastes of Christmas, my favorites would include Sees candy, Asian pears (crisp and juicy like an apple, flavored like a pear, bigger than a softball = sooo good!), honey-baked ham, ambrosia (this amazing fruit salad that my Uncle Kent makes), rainbow jello (pictured in a previous post), and Grandma Sheranian's toffee.

This Christmas I decided to try to make Grandma's toffee for the first time, but it turns out that in learning to making candy, experience is key. I knew making candy is difficult, so I made sure to read the recipe about 6 times before I started. I had my thermometer ready, and Brent's help stirring so I could monitor the temperature. 

Then, as I began to take the temperature of the melting butter and sugar, I realized that my thermometer was really intended for meat--not candy-- and only went to 220 degrees, when we needed to cook this candy precisely until it was 300 degrees. So Brent quickly calculated where the needle would need to fall for it to be 300. Good recovery.

Everything went great after that until Brent poured the toffee onto a cookie sheet to cool and we realized that something was missing: half of our plastic spoon!!! Lesson: DO NOT USE PLASTIC UTENSILS WHEN MAKING CANDY!!! So all the beautiful toffee ended up in the trashcan. So sad! Luckily, I had enough ingredients to make another batch the next day. We used a wooden spoon, and it turned out perfect!!

Brent holding the half-melted spoon. Isn't he so cute?

So, so sad. . .

All the contaminated toffee in the trash.

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The second batch of candy that turned out just right!