Making sweets yourself is super easy – whether healthy cough drops or colorfully striped fruit sweets. Here’s to the happy sucking fun! When it comes to “making your sweets,” I always have to think of the ‘Gummy Bears Gang’ episode in which three of the Bärchis produce so much pink cream candy that the castle is almost bursting at the seams. The whole thing looked highly delicious but, at the same time, was a bit off-putting.
Fortunately, the reality is that you can make sweets yourself without renovating the kitchen afterward. Promised.
The Benefits Of Homemade Candies
Pouring or pulling candies yourself has many advantages: The hard candies are free of artificial additives. In addition, you can decide for yourself how sweet or healthy your sweets should be – free choice of flavors on top.
Caution: You should not make sweets with children, as the sugar gets extremely hot when boiling and can cause burns if splashed or touched. We, therefore, recommend wearing heat-resistant rubber gloves when making the candy yourself.
Accessories For Homemade Sweets
To make candies yourself, you need the following accessories:
- Saucepan made of stainless steel
- Candy thermometer
- wooden spoon
- Silicone mold for chocolates or ice cubes
- Silicone baking mat (alternatively baking tray with baking paper)
- Silicone spatula
The Basic Recipe For Fruit Candies
For simple fruit candies, you only need three ingredients:
- 250 grams of granulated sugar
- 50 grams of glucose
- 100 ml fruit juice
The glucose gives the sweets the necessary strength and is essential. You are entirely free in your choice of juice. Popular are raspberry juice, strawberry juice, and multivitamin juice. But you can also try it with tea.
Tip: The sweets are a little “healthier” if you use half-half sugar and honey.
This Is How You Can Make Your Fruit Candy:
- Place the ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil over low heat. Stir with a wooden spoon until the sugar has dissolved. Then increase the temperature. Don’t stir from now on. Use the candy thermometer to check that the syrup does not get hotter than 162 degrees. A temperature of 153 degrees is perfect.
- Meanwhile, prepare a bowl of ice water (cold water and a few ice cubes). Once the 153 degrees have been reached, briefly place the casserole with the sugar syrup in the cold water bath. This will prevent the temperature from rising further.
- Grease the silicone mat or ice cube tray with vegetable oil. Now pour the hot candy mixture on or into it and let it cool down (ice cube molds are best placed in the freezer).
The Basic Recipe For Cream Candy
Do you prefer it creamy? Then you can add 40 g of butter to the fruit candy recipe. You should only add the butter to your sugar syrup when the mixture has reached a temperature of 120 degrees.
Alternatively, you can try the following recipe for toffee or fudge.
You Need These Ingredients:
- 200 grams of granulated sugar
- 250 ml whipped cream
- 20 grams of butter
- optional: 1 tsp vanilla extract
The preparation works like with fruit candies. The difference is that you only add the butter when the sugar has melted.
Homemade toffees tend to be softer than fruit ones, so you can easily cut them into chunks with a knife after they’ve cooled.
Make Cough Drops Yourself
During the cold season, nothing beats homemade cough drops. Here we rely on proven home remedies for cough irritation such as honey, lemon juice, ginger, sage, thyme, or other beneficial herbs.
Ingredients For Ginger Candy For Cough:
- 200 grams of sugar
- 2 tablespoons honey (e.g., thyme honey)
- 50 grams of glucose
- 150ml of water
- juice of a lemon
- a thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger (peeled and chopped)
- optional: a sprig of thyme
How To Prepare:
- Boil water, ginger, lemon juice, and thyme sprig in a saucepan. Then pour everything through a sieve.
- Add the sugar and dextrose to the sifted stock and cook over low heat in a stainless steel saucepan until the sugar has melted.
- Prepare a water bath as before. Once the sugar ginger syrup has reached a temperature of 153 degrees, cool the casserole in the bowl of ice water.
- Then pour the ginger candy mixture into a greased mold and let it set in the fridge to form candies or drip onto an oiled baking tray lined with baking paper as ginger drops.
Make Lollipops Yourself
The recipe and preparation of candy are the same as homemade lollipops. To do this, insert a cake pop stick into your candy drops that have just been placed on the baking tray. Alternatively, you can use special ice cube molds with a slot for a lollipop stick.
Is It Pouring, Breaking, Or Pulling Candy?
Pouring Candy: For beginners, we recommend running the candy mass into a greased silicone mold like homemade chocolates . This is minor work, and you can use it to create fantastic shapes like hearts or gummy bears
Breaking Candies: The Bachblech method is also simple if a bit martial. Finally, you have to break the cooled mass on the tray or the silicone mat into bite-sized pieces by hand – preferably with a metal scraper.
Tip: You can save yourself the effort by not pouring the candy mixture onto the mat as a whole but dripping it in small portions with a spoon.
Draw Candy: It becomes more difficult with so-called silk pillow sweets. The candy mass is kneaded while hot and pulled into a strand. This creates a silky white sheen. Then you cut the sweets with greased scissors into small pieces like pillows. Therefore the name.
Colorful striped candies can be conjured up using differently colored candy strands. The imaginative “Rocks candies” are even more artistic, which can have small motifs or even lettering in the middle. But you have to be a real candy baker to do that.
Make Silk Pillow Sweets Yourself
Do you want to try your hand at the pinnacle of sweets and make your silk pillow sweets? Then go through the following steps after cooking average fruit, cream, or cough drops:
- While the candy mass takes a short break in the ice water, you put on heat-resistant rubber gloves or smooth leather gloves – because, with silk pillow candies, you come into contact with the hot sugar mass.
- Carefully pour the candy mass onto the greased silicone mat. Now is the time to be quick! For multi-colored candies, divide the mixture into two or more portions. Use a silicone scraper to roll the liquid mass back and forth until it becomes firmer and can be shaped like dough.
- Knead parts that should remain white with your hands until the candy dough shimmers white due to the air that has been worked in. You can work food coloring into the other candy parts if desired. You can also add liquid baking flavors and create different flavor combinations if you like.
- Now it’s time to roll – but quickly! Because the individual strands of candy have cooled down too much, they no longer stick together. Wrap several thin strands of color lengthways around the thick base strand from all sides for striped candies. You connect the strands with a quick rolling motion over the non-stick mat. You can also twist the candy roll to make colorful spiral candies.
Tip: If the candy strands can no longer be connected, you can wet them with a bit of water and a silicone brush to make them stickier.
- Cut the finished strand of candy into small pieces with oiled scissors. If they are still malleable, you can use the ball of your hand to roll them into spherical candies.
Tip: You can leave thin sticks of candy in one piece. You get striped candy canes for Christmas if you bend the upper strand slightly.
This Is How You Can Store Your Sweets
To prevent the finished sweets from sticking together, dust or roll them in some powdered sugar. You can then store them in an airtight container.
Even more decorative: A glass bonbonniere – colorfully filled not only the start of every candy bar but also an ingenious DIY gift from the kitchen.
Tip: If you prefer to wrap the homemade sweets individually, we would like to recommend sustainable packaging material made of wax paper instead of cling film.
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