Buffalo Sponge Candy

It's Christmas candy time! Every year I try to make a new confection. One year it was peppermint patties. Another year it was a brandy-soaked fruitcake. Five years in a row it has been homemade marshmallows, which I still haven't been arsed to do. It's not a perfect tradition. This year I decided to make Buffalo Sponge Candy, using this recipe I found on Pinterest - my go-to source for inspiration, consternation, and disappointment. This stuff is like Violet Crumble or Crunchie bars; a light honeycomb dipped in chocolate. YUM. Can it be done in Hawaii? The land where candy sweats and dissolves and gets slogged away by ants before you can get back to the table with your hot cocoa? Let's find out, I said! I knew, people. I knew. So this candy is pretty simple: sugar, corn syrup, an infinitesimal amount of gelatin to bind the bubbles, and baking powder to make it explode. Also "very good" chocolate, for dipping in afterward. (Actually, looking back at the recipe, it doesn't say this at all, but "very good" was what I was chanting in my head while tossing aside bags of generic chocolate chips at the grocery store. It's a safe enough rule to live by, very good chocolate.)

 

1/2 tsp gelatin (bloomed in 1 tsp of water and reheated to liquid just before adding)

1 ½ cups sugar

½ cups corn syrup (light or dark or medium or whatever you have)

½ cup water

1 tbsp baking soda (sifted)

We had to make sure the chocolate was very good, first. Sometimes they poison these things, you know. My kids all know the "just to make sure it's not poisoned" sampling procedure we perform when opening anything made with chocolate.

So you boil up the sugars with a bit of water to 300 degrees. I don't have a candy thermometer, but I have made and ruined enough candy over the years to know all the stages of sugar. Boil it to hard crack, testing with a bowl of cold water every half a minute or so. You'll know because it stops balling up and becomes long threads of hard candy when it drips in the water. Don't stick your fingers in it or lick the spoon. It's 300 fucking degrees.

Then you mix in your bloom'd gelatin and whip in the baking soda and pour the thing out while it's very foamy and alarming. Yell, "10 points to Hufflepuff!" because you know this is really a Hufflepuff kind of thing.

I got a bit sidetracked at this point, because something on my counter smelled like a rotting corpse. I sniffed it down to the gelatin dish. Turns out that just because it's made of boiled horse's knees, gelatin smells like boiled horse's knees.

Tip: follow the directions and use baking parchment, or you'll be chipping this shit out of your pan with a knife later, and then chipping bits of Pyrex out of your candy when that goes wrong.

Let it cool for a few hours. Spend this time chasing cats out of your tree. 

I finally put the dish in the fridge, after determining that it was just going to sit and sweat if I left it out on the table, assuming the ants didn't find it first. Which they would, because they had formed squirmy black sweaters of themselves all over the drips I had gotten on the floor, and I murdered them with a sponge.

It sweated in the fridge anyway. When I broke pieces off, the inside had the right crumbly texture, but by the time you got it in your mouth it was already moist enough to glue your jaw shut when you bit down on it. I pried candy out of my fillings and then dumped rice in the bag, hoping to soak up the moisture and dry it out a bit. This is a trick that works with salt. If you visit Hawaii and discover restaurant salt shakers full of rice, this is why. That "when it rains it pours" girl on the Morton carton LIES.

So of course, the rice glued itself all over the candy.

Well, shit.

I got the chocolate out anyway.

And just ate it.

Ew. This picture is kind of lewd. I'm sorry. That is how it happened. MOM STAYS IN THE PICTURE.

So now I have a brick of candy covered in rice sitting in the fridge, because I remain naively optimistic that it'll still dry out and I can just flick the rice off and break the stuff up to dip in chocolate. I'm wondering if I could combat the humidity by boiling the candy just a bit longer and omitting the gelatin, which in my mind could be responsible for the bit of chewiness where I want a bit of crumbliness. For all the money I'm going to waste on this endeavor, I could have just bought half a dozen Violet Crumble bars, but that is beside the point. It's the doing of the thing. It's the thrill of the endeavor. It's the conquest and the victory dance and the remorse of eating it afterward. It's the staying off of Facebook and not arguing with redneck uncle about news articles.

Opt for adventure, folks. And go make this candy, because it's really easy and fun, actually - if you live ANYWHERE drier than the mid-Pacific.

Edit: YOU GUYS IT WORKED. I chipped the thing up and dipped the things in melted chocolate and at first it all softened into toffee, so I chucked it in the fridge and the chocolate did some kind of alchemy and IT SOLIDIFIED INTO CRUNCHIE NUGGETS.

I am so impressed. Naive optimism ftw!