Candy Corn

I recently exchanged some homemade candy with minoanmiss, and it was so great-- she has a balcony, and so we could talk for a bit while maintaining a reasonable distance. Meeting someone new and cool in person is not a thing that I have done since the pandemic started, and since I was also picking up nineweaving at the house of one of her old and dear friends in western MA, I got to do it twice in one day.

Also, I made candy corn for the swap, and realized that although homemade candy corn is a thing I make, I have not written up the process/recipe before.

Homemade candy corn is an interesting thing. I have never liked the commercial variety, and I always assumed that the candy corn we get in stores is, as with many candies, the mass-production version of a home original, which explains things like the quantity of carnauba wax in it. However, when I looked it up, I discovered that actually candy corn was invented in the 1880s for industrial production, and the recipe has always been based around carnauba wax and corn syrup. Therefore, any homemade version is an attempt to recapture the taste of the original in a form that can be made without needing giant machines.

I use Alton Brown's home recipe, and it's shockingly good at doing that. It tastes like candy corn, except that I like it. (Well, under normal circumstances. The batch I made for minoanmiss was a little different, because it turns out that the vanilla and almond extracts in my kitchen are made by the same company, in the same kind and size of bottle, and were sitting right next to one another. Were. They are not now. I am not sure the result had the candy corn nature, but I thought it was quite a good almond candy. I note that almond-flavored commercial candy corn does not appear to be a thing; maybe someone should try it. I also note that when I Googled to see whether almond candy corn is a thing, I discovered that some people use a sweetened almond flour dough to make cobs to stick candy corn into, which sounds cloying and appalling but also as though it satisfies the deep, atavistic craving to, somehow, just sit down and eat an entire corn cob, an urge I cannot possibly be alone in having fought off my entire life. More pondering needed.)

I would call this an easy recipe to make and an advanced recipe to shape. I am frankly not good at shaping and cutting it. But the taste does not suffer by the presentation.

Homemade Candy Corn

Ingredients, according to Alton Brown:

4 1/2 ounces confectioner's sugar (about 1 1/4 cups)
1/2 ounce nonfat dry milk (about 6 1/2 teaspoons)
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
3 1/2 ounces granulated sugar (about 1/2 cup)
3 3/4 ounces light corn syrup (about 1/3 cup)
2 1/2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 or 3 drops each yellow and orange gel paste food coloring

I have never actually used kosher salt for this; you can substitute standard table salt with no trouble by halving the quantity (so 1/8 teaspoon). I generally spring for the good butter, though, because you really can tell. I have always worked by measurements instead of by weight, and seen no issues. Also, while gel paste food coloring may be more efficient, the liquid kind absolutely works-- this is not one of those applications where liquid color just disappears into nothingness or makes your dough grey. And of course you can use whatever colors you want. My most recent was blue, orange, and white.

Equipment, according to Alton Brown:

food processor
2-quart pot, with lid
candy thermometer
silicone spatula
sheet pan
silicone baking mat or parchment paper
knife/slicer/bench scraper/pizza cutter

According to me: YOU DO NOT NEED A FOOD PROCESSOR.

Alton Brown's first step is to combine the confectioner's sugar, nonfat dry milk, and salt in a food processor and pulse it four or five times, until smooth and well-combined. You can use a fork in a bowl. I legit don't know why he recommends a food processor, because mixing it by hand enough not to be lumpy takes about five minutes.

Anyway, then you put the granulated sugar, corn syrup, and water in the pot over medium heat, cover it and let it cook four minutes. Then mix in the butter, put in the candy thermometer, and let it cook without stirring. You want to get it to 230F, which is soft ball stage, i.e. a drop of the syrup will form a soft ball in cold water but flatten when taken out. When it hits soft ball, take it off the heat.

Add the dry ingredients and the vanilla, and stir hard and continuously with a silicon spatula until combined. You DO need a silicon spatula, because otherwise your stirring implement will be very difficult to clean.

Mr. Brown then tells you to pour the mixture onto a sheet pan lined with baking paper or a parchment mat, but honestly? You don't need a sheet pan. I just pour it onto baking paper on a clean, flat surface.

Let the dough cool ten to fifteen minutes until you can handle it, and then divide the dough into three even pieces. Leave one white. Put two or three drops of food coloring on each of the others, and knead it in until the color is dispersed evenly.

This next part is where I start having trouble; Mr. Brown wants you to roll each piece of dough into a strand eighteen inches long or so, which is easy, but then he wants you to cut each strand in half and roll each half into a strand 1/2 inch thick and twenty-two inches long, and in my experience you need two people for that. It's long enough that it becomes awkward and droopy to hold, and tries to stick to you and everything else, even if you have sugared and/or oiled your hands and other surfaces. Unless I have help, therefore, I consider the whole thing rustic and artisanal and just leave the strands eighteen inches long.

Then you put the strands next to each other, shoving a little so they stick, and cut them into pieces. You can use your hands or a bench scraper to shape them into, theoretically, a candy corn shape; again, I am not very good at this.

Let it cool at least an hour-- note that as soon as you have finished shaping it, you can put it in the fridge if you want to speed up the cooling.

Store in an airtight container (Ziploc bags are fine) with baking paper between each layer. Makes eighty to one hundred commercial-sized candy corn pieces, or, if you're me, twenty to thirty much larger ones.

I've never had any stick around long enough to go bad, but since it has butter, I would expect it to go off eventually despite the massive quantities of sugar. (Sugar is, after all, a preservative.) I think I'd start putting it in the fridge after about two weeks, and start suspecting it after about a month, but that's entirely based on my personal intuition.

People who do not like candy corn may well like this; people who do like candy corn will. It goes very well at parties, as it feels seasonal but is a little fancier than the standard candy corn bowl.