A friend of mine gave me some molds & springform pans. Been playing with too many recipes for the shop to play with the springform pans at the moment. Already have 6-7 great cheesecake recipes & don’t think I’ll offer tham at the shop so I really don’t have time to play with them at this time. But later, when I start making Christmas gifts that’ll be another story.
The candy molds are a different thing altogether. Besides the possibility of selling the candy, candy can be very useful for decorating a cake or cupcakes. Never have done this so figured this should be interesting. I’ve made taffy & fudge, but they’re an entirely different breed of candy.
Well, I was right. It was interesting. First, keep in mind that I don’t just jump into this. I read & research at several different websites including cakecentral.com before doing it. You want to know a way to do it? Can’t help you. You want 4-5 different ways to do it including contradictory ways? Now, you’re talking!
The molds I picked out of my collection to work with was 1 that had Christmas trees, snowman & Santa faces & a lollipop mold with 4 different designs. Not wanting to make things too complicated I nixed the idea of using Santa as he would entail too many colors. The only lollipop I wanted to use was the cupcake. Cupcakes are cute, cupcakes are “in” & would make a fun sucker.
Candy molds filled with candy melts. Notice the paintbrush used to paint the snowman
From all my research, it sounded to me that the easiest way to get the colored details would be to paint them with the colored chocolate. I have nice small brushes I keep only for my baking so that seemed doable. Well maybe not. Let’s just say painting with chocolate inside small molds is not that easy.
Melted my colors & poured them into the molds. Decided to go with the “let it harden naturally” crowd so left the molds on the table to dry. To say it was difficult to get the candy out of the mold would be an understatement. Took a lot of pushing to get the pieces to pop out. Did I mention, that my beautiful two colored cupcake broke in half. That made Jim happy as he is always glad to get the “mistakes” out of my way. So I’m thinking, these people are crazy to do this. This is too much like work. I can’t believe some people actually consider this fun! Thoughts like that crowded my mind before I finally conceded to myself that perhaps that was not the best method for making the candy.
I decided that painting the details was the problem as a thin layer of the candy melts was sticking to the mold. Carefully cleaned the molds & decided to try again. Only this time I would use the squeeze bottle method to do the candies. This worked a bit better. Still not satisfied with how the colors run, but suspect part of that is just a matter of practice. The trees & snowmen pop out this time without leaving much of a layer on the mold, but it’s still there. The result of that is that the candy pieces don’t shine.
Due to the amount of pushing I had to do on the candy pieces to get them out of the mold, I’m still thinking this is a pain. Better than the first batch & method , but it’s still a pain. Coward that I am I decided to leave the cupcake to deal with in the morning. I can’t bear the thought of seeing 2 of them break in half in one day.
Tags: blog, candy, candy melts, candy molds, food