Kool-Aid Taffy
2 1/2 cups sugar
3 tablespoon cornstarch
1 cup corn syrup
1 1/3 cup water
2 tablespoons butter (+ the rest of a stick for hands)
1 pack of Kool-Aid in desired flavor
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
Other helpful supply: candy thermometer (If you don't have one you can pick one up at Walmart for about $4
1. Butter a cookie sheet. The larger and shallower the better. Make sure to cover the pan and the sides.
2. In a LARGE pan mix sugar and cornstarch. Then add in the corn syrup, water, salt, and butter. Stir well.
3. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Once it starts boiling STOP STIRRING! Let it boil until it reaches 250 degrees on a candy thermometer. REMOVE FROM HEAT!
4. Stir in Kool-Aid and salt. Stir very well.
5. Pour out into the buttered pan you made earlier. Let this sit until cool enough to be handled.
6. Once cooled, butter hands well and begin to pull and twist. Fold over and do again for 10-15 minutes.
7. Pull into long rope and cut into small pieces with buttered scissors.
8. Wrap the cut pieces in wax paper.
9. Enjoy!
I let the kids do most of the work on this one. Except the waiting. Kids don't like waiting so they played toss the penguin bean bag while I waited and watched.
They added everything into the pan. Be careful not to stir the sugar/cornstarch mix too quickly. Brianna is an enthusiastic stirrer and we ended up with a cloud of fine powder encroaching on the kitchen.
Once it started to boil I had them go butter the pan. I told them to paint it on thick until the whole pan was covered including the sides.
You know how they say 'a watched pot never boils', well this is VERY true when it comes to watching a candy thermometer rise. I have some, but not a lot, experience using my candy thermometer. I don't have enough to know how fast something will get to temperature. After watching this for around 15 minutes and it slowly creeping to 220 degrees I figured I had about 10 minutes more. I am lumping myself in the children and took a break from the waiting game. I walked away for 5 minutes and it was almost to 260 degrees. Oops! I figured it hadn't made it to 'hard ball' stage so we would continue anyway! So it took somewhere in the 15-20 minute range to reach the desired temperature.
It took about 35 minutes to get the candy mixture to a temperature I felt the children could handle. It might take more or less for you depending on the thickness of pan. Mine is a fairly small cookie sheet. It was coated with an oily butter film over most of it and therefore came out of the pan pretty easily. It did however stick in a few spots and then got solidified rock hard on my nails. It came off with water and some biting. The candy not the nail. Sooooo, anyway, I pulled it out and squashed it into a ball for the kids to start pulling.
They pulled....
...and pulled. For about 15 minutes they pulled. They had to rebutter their hands often. After this amount of time, and my repeats of not pulling it into 2 different balls. Theirs wasn't quite what it should look like. While the kids were pulling I had been cutting out about 4x4 inch square pieces of wax paper to wrap the candies in.
More uniformed pulling is what is needed. I took over for a few minutes and the went back to tossing the penguin. Seriously, they were really amused with tossing the penguin. For like hours.
I didn't get any pictures of what it should look like when pilling but pulling it into thin strings isn't the winner. I pulled it out as long as possible without getting too thin and then folded it back over itself and twisted it. Shampoo, rinse, repeat I did this for probably 10 minutes. You will know when it's gotten better because it will go from a translucent and darker to opaque and lighter. As an adult I was more mindful of the butter because the taffy refused to stick to itself very well after the kid had used so much butter. I tried to do it without any butter until I got it to a point where it was combining instead of sliding off itself.
I then pulled it out into a rope on some wax paper. It might be better to do this on a buttered cookie sheet of two as it did stick in a few places and ripped the paper into it. We didn't use these pieces.
The kids wrapped the candies. It works best if you form them into small balls or cubes by pressing them. I was giving them pieces that were about 1 inch by 1/2 inch or so. They were by no means uniform.
I used kitchen shears and made sure to butter them every 5 pieces or so to keep them from sticking to the scissors.
All in all we ended up with about 150 pieces of wrapped candy. This is after we removed some chucks due to paper stickage (wax paper and a large chuck I got a paper towel stuck to trying to remove butter after I dropped the end in the now soft stick of butter) and the one we ate. It would have probably been 200 or more if we had used all of it to wrap.
Grand Total = Maybe around $4 in ingredients I already had on hand
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