New Things, New Flings

As I posted before, this weekend was sort of a weekend of experiments with candies.  The two candies I tried to tackle were taffy and caramel.  I worked on my taffy recipe on Saturday night while watching Tangled.  I didn't really get to watch any of the movie because my eyes were glued to the pot on the stove and the candy thermometer.  Unfortunately, the taffy turned out very gooey.  The recipe I went off of said to get it to the hard ball stage when really it should have probably been closer to the cracking stage.

Then on Sunday, I decided I had a few hours to try the caramels.  I read up on it a little and a lot of people were saying to be patient with the caramel and that it could take up to an hour to reach 250 degrees.  It took TWO HOURS!  I'm not sure though, it might be my thermometer but I did the test and it seemed on a degree or two off (which I took into account).  After about the first hour I tried turning the temperature up a little which I thought could backfire on me, since I read so much about being patient, and it did.  So, here is my caramel scorching:

Here is the finished product.  You may not be able to see but it isn't as smooth as caramel is supposed to be and I blame that on the batch scorching.