Maple Candy

I'm not sure what it is exactly that makes me decide to blog about a particular event or activity, but today when I decided to make maple syrup candy, I knew I wanted to take pictures along the way for a blog post.  I wanted to show you a lovely "Little House in the Big Woods" moment, while educating my children on candy-making and bonding over sweet treats on this rare snow-day.  Blissfully sweet, right?

 This is the only picture I got before things got sticky.  

I soon realized this post wouldn't have such sweet perfection, and that it would need to contain more humor than I originally anticipated.

I opened my jar of lovely syrup which was handmade by my husband's family in Upper Peninsula Michigan.  I poured the sweetness in a small pot (that's what the instructions said, "small pot"... but, ok, I may have done 4x the syrup it called for), and then I got my daughter, Vera, bundled up to get snow with me for cooling our candy.  I went ahead and turned the heat on the burner because we'd be back inside in just a moment...

 When we got back inside the syrup had just started to boil over the edge of my pot... beautiful, beautiful maple syrup all over the place.  Somewhat tragic indeed.  Lesson one: Don't leave your heated syrup unattended for even one moment!

I used a spatula to try to scoop it up into a bowl (off the stove, not off the floor), and we went ahead and poured that bit over the snow (which did nothing but make maple flavored snow because it hadn't cooked long enough yet).  Flustered, I quickly poured the rest of the syrup into a larger pot and switched to one of my remaining clean burners.

 

See?  Now when it started to boil up, it was less likely to spill over the edges.  Lesson two:  Put your syrup in a BIG pot (I still almost boiled over the edges of this pot... I should have used my largest one).

 Vera proceeded to help me clean by running her fingers through the syrup on the counter.  One lick off the counter, one lick out of the snow, one lick off the counter, one...

 Finally I'd cooked the syrup more or less long enough to pour over the snow, which gave us sticky, runny, messy "candy."

 By this point, Vera's taste for maple syrup had already been totally satiated and she did not want to eat any of the goop.  My older son had gotten himself into trouble and lost all rights to eating candy for the rest of the day.  Silas, 16 months old, was thankfully still asleep.  So that left me with a big uneaten pile of sad looking candy.

BUT! I had reserved most of the cooked syrup to turn into hard maple sugar candies.  After it had cooled about 10 minutes, I stirred and stirred that syrup till it seemed to magically turn into a big clump of delicious candy.

Lesson three:  Call up the relatives in Upper Peninsula Michigan to get their tips on maple syrup candy to avoid learning the hard way (I'm realizing I tend to jump in without stopping to plan and read the small print on things, which is sometimes a great quality, and other times it gets my kitchen all covered in syrup).

It amazes me that the two candies above were made from the same syrup cooked the exact same amount of time, but they were just treated differently.  The left was immediately poured onto the snow, and the one on the right cooled and then got stirred up.  I didn't have any cute maple leaf molds, so we'll be settling for rock-like chunks.

And that, my friends, is my Laura Ingalls Wilder moment gone not so picturesque.