Tirzah Mae has been begging me to make molasses candy since we first read Little House in the Big Woods last year.
We just re-read the Christmas chapter again today and this time I was ready. After rest time, we would make molasses candy.
We don’t have snow here in Wichita right now, so I whizzed up some ice cubes into a very respectable snow using my immersion blender. I put the snow back into the freezer.
I called Tirzah Mae into the room and kept her busy stirring molasses and sugar while I prepared the baked beans for supper.
I deemed the syrup hot enough and poured it over the snow.
It wasn’t hot enough. I really need to get myself a candy thermometer (I must have broken my last one, because it’s nowhere to be found.)
Our molasses candy was a gooey mess.
What’s more, it tastes like… well, like… molasses.
[Gasp!]
Louis spit his piece onto the helping tower, where it melted into slime.
I scraped up the rest (the stuff that was on the snow, not the stuff that had been in Louis’s mouth) and stuck it in a patty pan in the freezer – maybe I’ll see if the kids are willing to try it again, or maybe I’ll use it as a sweetener for something else.
Then we sat down for dinner – baked beans and cornbread using the recipe Daniel and I devised in 2015 from the one described by Laura in Farmer Boy.
So even if our molasses candy experiment was less than satisfying, it does pay to keep on trying the things we read about in books – occasionally we end up with keepers (I make Mother Wilder’s baked beans at least every couple of months!)
Aw, that’s too bad about the candy. I wonder if drizzling small portions might have helped. I don’t know.
I always wanted to make “vanity cakes” until I realized they sounded something like funnel cakes, only in small puffs rather than long strings. Might still try them some day.
That’s great about the baked beans! And fun to try things from books.