In my defense, I’m a candy idiot.
Oh, I know what goes into candy, and generally how it’s made.
But if I ever have the notion to try to cook it at home again, please hit me over the head with a double boiler.
But maybe I should back up.
An editor suggested it might be “fun” if I took a new little book called “Field Guide to Candy” and wrote about whipping up some homemade sweets for Halloween. As it turned out it would have been more fun to take the “Field Guide to Candy” and hack it to pieces with my father’s World War II machete.
But I digress.
I was a good soldier and said I’d give the homemade candy the old college try. Let’s just say I flunked out of that college. The taste of two of my candies was, to be charitable, bad.
We decided to make three kinds of Halloween goodies: the traditional candy corn, some sort of candy bar and festive gummy worms (which turned into gummy jack-o’-lanterns when we couldn’t find a gummy worm mold).
It sounded challenging, even interesting. For a short period I even found myself looking forward to it. Oh, what fun I’d have making candy at home with my wife and daughter, I told myself. How hard could it be?
This is, of course, where the idiot part comes in. I had no idea how hard it would be to make good candy at home. It’s brutal.
And a bit pointless. Unless you’re a pro, cooking your own Halloween candy is a little like trying to make your own napkins out of wood pulp.
You could do it. But why?
OK, foodies, settle down. I know. It’s the “adventure.”
Suit yourself.
I came at this with no experience, expectations or — apparently — culinary skills. And so it is that I address readers with similar inexperience when I say — run away! Save yourself! Give up before your head explodes!
I should note that I did have help from my 16-year-old daughter, Allison, and my wife, Susan, who took pity on me and at least kept the “adventure” from being a total disaster.
Actually, it didn’t start out too badly. I decided to make chocolate-dipped nougats, kind of like little 3 Musketeers bars. Making the nougat went perfectly. Ingredients mixed, melted and morphed as expected, and cooled down nicely in the refrigerator overnight into a fluffy square of sugary goodness. The problem came the next day when I tried to cut it into pieces.
It was sticky and it simply wouldn’t cut right.
I tried a regular knife.
Nope.
I oiled the knife.
Nope.
I tried a plastic knife.
Better — until it snapped in two.
Finally, I grabbed a meat cleaver. By this point I was so crazed I might as well have donned a hockey mask, too. This stuff stuck to the knives, it stuck to my fingers, it stuck to the aluminum foil and the wax paper. But mostly it stuck to itself. After what seemed like half an hour I had finally hacked up the nougaty blob into various sized rhombuses and quadrilaterals.
Finally I was ready to dip it in Ghirardelli’s best chocolate. Since I don’t own a double boiler, I melted it, first in a glass bowl set over hot water, then in the microwave 15 seconds at a time. I was attempting to “temper” the chocolate so it would be glassy and smooth and wouldn’t get that ugly white look after it dried.
That part was successful. But the dipping was a debacle. Now I grant you, dipping a lump of malformed nougat in melted chocolate doesn’t sound all that daunting. Let’s just say I have a newfound respect for the M&M Mars folks. It didn’t matter whether we used a fork, a slotted spoon or our hands, we made a mess. Our “chocolate bars” came out with way too much chocolate. They tasted good, but the heavy coating managed to smush the nougat pieces until they were almost flat.
To reach feature writer James A. Fussell, call 816-234-4460 or send e-mail to jfussell@kcstar.com.
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