Maple Candy

This year's syrup harvest is going well.  In just a week of boiling, I netted a little over a gallon of finished syrup.  (Which means I boiled roughly 40 gallons of sap that week . .)  I'd say that gallon of syrup should easily last us for the coming year.  But, just in case, and because the weather continues to hold off the maple buds from swelling too much, I am continuing to collect sap, and boil it down.  You never know when a little syrup stockpile will come in handy; because of crazy weather I didn't tap trees at all in 2016 or 2017.  So its nice to have extra syrup on hand and I'll keep collecting sap until the buds on the trees get too developed.

Yesterday I boiled for more than twelve hours, with cold sap being added to the pot at regular intervals.  My goal this weekend is to just keep adding and boiling, and see how many gallons of sap I can get through.  Around 5:00 this evening I'll stop adding sap and just boil off what is in the pot at that point.  So far this weekend, I've boiled more than 15 gallons of sap.  I'm thinking that even with not boiling anything between bedtime Saturday and roughly 1:30  this afternoon (Palm Sunday church service with a potluck lunch after took up all morning and part of the early afternoon) I most likely will have boiled enough sap to net about 1/2 gallon more syrup.

From the batch that I finished off on Thursday afternoon, I had roughly a cup of syrup more than would fit into my pint jars--I do not pour partial jars and then top off with the next batch, although I suppose you could if you wanted to.  So I poured it into a dish and set it aside, planning an experiment of sorts.  You see, I've been toying with the idea of making those little maple leaf candies that are so ungodly expensive to buy.  I understand why they are so expensive, as syrup is so time consuming to produce.  But that doesn't mean I'm going to shell out money to buy them.  No, I want to take my virtually free (not counting my labor) syrup and make them myself.  I even bought a mold to do so last time I went to Shipshewana (here).

So, yesterday afternoon, while minding the boiling pot (ie. staying home and checking it about every 15 minutes), I decided I was going to do it.  Make candy, that is.

It is ridiculously easy, although I can see that like many things, it will take practice to perfect the technique.  Mine came out totally edible, if not exactly aesthetically pleasing.

Basically, you pour your syrup into a pot that looks way deeper than necessary--it will bubble up quite a bit during heating (note brown marks on pot in photo below).  Then, with the aide of a candy thermometer, you heat that syrup to 240 degrees.  This actually doesn't take very long at all, so don't walk away!

Once the syrup reaches 240, remove the pot from the burner (and shut the burner off!) and let it sit undisturbed (don't even take out the candy thermometer) for 3 minutes.

Then, using a wooden spoon, stir that sucker the hot syrup vigorously until it thickens and loses it's gloss. This doesn't take more than a few minutes.

Immediately (like literally as fast as you can and I still wasn't fast enough), pour the thickened syrup into the molds and shave off any excess that sticks up above the surface of the mold. Let cool (I think it took 10-15 minutes?) and then turn the mold over and gently tap to dislodge the candies.

leaves, blobs, whatever

I will definitely make more of these.  After all, I'm a perfectionist.  I need to practice, practice, practice until I can make them beautiful as well as edible. I'm pretty sure I can whip (stir) the syrup just a hair less before putting it into the molds next time.  The first couple candies came out the most uniform, and as the whipped syrup got cooler, it got harder to spoon off into the mold. Hence not exactly looking like a maple leaf.  So, next time I  will leave it a little runnier and a little hotter when I mold it.

And the awesome thing I learned about this, is that you can easily make maple sugar this exact way: just pour it out into a sheet (like on a cookie sheet) rather than into molds, and let it cool.  Then pulse it in the blender to break it up.

Mmmmm!