Homemade Candy Corn? Say What!

It's true!  Did you know you can make your own candy corn?!

One of Jerry's and the kid's favorite Fall candies are candy corn, but especially the candy pumpkins.  I have found all kinds of amazing homemade recipes online like corn syrup, marshmallows, peanut butter, poptarts, Nutrigrain bars, butter and many other things.

If I was in the US, I probably wouldn't bother with these things.  But when you can't get this stuff you seem to want it more than ever!  I find it a fun challenge to try and recreate these things in my kitchen.

So what do I do?  Like many other times, I go to the web and see what I find!  And sure enough, there was candy corn!  And it is really easy.  Just time consuming.

The great thing about finding these recipes online is you get to read opinions and how they tweaked the recipe.  So, away I went.

Ingredients

1 cup sugar

2/3 cup corn syrup

1 Tablespoon honey

5 tablespoons butter (I used salted)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1/3 cup non fat milk powder

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Red and yellow food coloring

some gloves for mixing in the food coloring

a pizza cutter for the cutting

Bring first 4 ingredients to boil over high heat in a heavy large saucepan. Reduce heat to medium and boil 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and add the vanilla.

Sift powdered sugar, milk powder, and salt into medium bowl.  Be sure you do this step or it will come out with all kinds of little lumps.  I don't have a sifter (must get one), so I pushed it through a fine strainer that I had.  Add powdered sugar mixture to pan; stir to combine. 

Let mixture stand until slightly warm to touch, about 30 minutes.  Divide dough into 3 equal pieces; place each piece in small bowl. Get out some gloves before adding the food coloring the dough.  I used about 8 drops of yellow food coloring for the yellow and then used 2 drops of red and 6 drops of yellow to make the orange.  Knead the food coloring into dough until smooth and color is even.  If your dough becomes tough, just put it in the microwave for about 10 seconds to soften it up and make it more workable.

I then cut each color into fourths to make it easier to roll into ropes.

Reegan getting in on the rolling action!

Don’t roll too thin or dough will break. Push three ropes together to form a long rectangle. 

Using the pizza cutter, cut ropes into triangles.   This process takes a while so be patient or you'll get your candy corn pieces too big.  Which I did and some of them I cut in two to make them smaller.

I gave each of them some of the extra dough to play with to keep them busy. 

Using fingers, shape candy corn as desired. Store at room temperature in airtight container, separating layers with pieces of waxed paper to prevent sticking.

 I looked at several different blogs to come up with the right combination for me.  I actually had to make 2 batches.  For me it is so much easier to use a candy thermometer when making candy, but none of the recipes used it.  One recipe said to boil the mixture on medium high, then they revised it and said that was too hot and changed it to low (which is what I did) and it didn't turn out.  Another one suggested medium low, so I went with medium on the second batch and that one turned out.

I'm going to do some research online to see if I can salvage the first attempt

So there you have it!  Homemade candy corn!!  I'm not sure I'll attempt that again.  We'll see how I feel about it once Fall rolls around next year!