Maple Cream Candy

Today I decided to try my hand at making cream candy.

You may not know what cream candy is. People in Eastern Kentucky make it. It’s a strange, light, rich, buttery, chalky candy that collapses and dissolves in your mouth. My grandmother used to make it over the holidays.

I have wanted to make it for years, simply for nostalgic reasons. I wasn’t absolutely crazy about it though, and I figured it was a big project, so I put it off. I knew I was supposed to have a marble slab for making cream candy. Where do you get a thing like that? I didn’t care enough to find out.

To make it, you heat a mixture of sugar solution and cream until it reaches the “hard ball” stage. Then you dump it on a very cold slab, and it crystallizes or something. Then you have to pick it up and stretch it over and over, like taffy. Eventually, you cut it in pieces with scissors. Then you have to let it sit overnight. As it sits, it becomes very soft and fragile.

I still don’t have a marble slab, and I am not willing to drop boiling candy on a stone counter. I decided to try something different: an aluminum pan in a bed of ice. Cold is cold, right? Should work.

The one unsatisfying thing about cream candy is the flavor. It’s just vanilla. I thought maple would be better, so I’m using maple syrup from Walmart instead of sugar and water. I don’t know if this will work. Sometimes you just have to experiment.

Bourbon would also be a good flavoring.

I’m trying to make a traditional sweet, but I’m using a flavor from a different part of the country. You have to try what works instead of banging your head against tradition.

A mature person would not have changed so many variables at once. I’m pretty confident my approach will work, though.

According to various sites, the “hard ball stage” occurs when a sugar solution hits about 92% sugar. If you take candy at this stage and drop it in cold water, it forms a ball which is hard, but not so hard you can’t deform it.

I don’t know what pulling the candy does, but it must be important. It reminds me of taffy, which is also pulled. My understanding is that before it softens overnight, cream candy is taffy. I guess I’ll know soon.

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I just finished pulling the candy and cutting it into pieces. Even if it never turns into cream candy, it’s wonderful taffy.

I don’t think I understood how the process worked when I first read about it. I had always been told I needed a super-cold marble slab to cool the melted candy, so today, when I poured it into the cold pan, I waited until it got very cold. That made it so hard it cracked in places. It was impossible to pull until I wrestled with it for about 10 minutes. After some very hard work, it loosened up so I could finish.

I believe “hard ball” just means “Sugar Daddy consistency.” If you’ve ever eaten a Sugar Daddy, you have eaten candy very much like the hard ball candy I made today. It wouldn’t flow, but it was also impossible to crack at room temperature.

It’s embarrassing to say it, but Eastern Kentucky is not a hub of engineering creativity. I don’t know why people there are still using heavy marble slabs to cool candy. I used one pan sitting in another pan. I filled the lower pan with ice and water. I put 4 upside-down spoons in the lower pan to keep the upper pan from rocking. It seems like it worked just fine, and I don’t have a slab to contend with.

Now that I’ve made the candy, I think I understand the purpose of chilling a marble slab in a freezer. I thought maybe it was necessary to have a super-cold slab in order to cool the candy extremely quickly and cause some kind of weird crystal formation. I think that’s wrong, since it’s very clearly undesirable to get the candy very cold. I now believe the only reason for a cold slab is to speed up the cooling process so you don’t have to stand in the kitchen and wait forever.

I thought I would also be able to change the cutting technique. People say you have to use scissors. I thought that was silly. They also say you have to chill the scissors for at least an hour in a freezer to keep the candy from sticking. That made no sense to me at all, since scissors get as cold as they can possibly be in maybe 10 minutes.

When I tried a cleaver on the candy, it was useless. Poultry shears snipped pieces right off, however. The traditional approach was correct. I didn’t have to chill them. They worked just fine.

By this time tomorrow, I’ll know whether this is cream candy or just extremely delicious semi-hard candy. Either way, it’s a win. The flavor is magnificent. I like traditional cream candy pretty well, but this stuff will be a home run if it works. I’m already thinking of other uses for reduced maple syrup.