How To Make Your Favorite Halloween Candies At Home Slideshow
While Tootsie Rolls seem like a mystery to many, we were pleased to learn that creating your own is really as straightforward as making dough. Butter, milk powder, and a few other ingredients are just blended together to get a sticky, thick dough used to make the bite-sized candies. To make the dough, we used a stand mixer with a greased bowl and dough hook to overcome the thickness and stickiness.
Tootsie Rolls — The Shape
The classic part about the Tootsie Roll is its round shape. To get the little cylinders, we rolled our dough to ½-inch thick rolls, chilled it, cut it into small rectangular pieces with a pizza cutter, and then rolled them out with our palms.
Tootsie Rolls — The Recipe
Overall, the recipe was a success, and some may agree that ours is better than the real thing. Because the dough is sticky, we wrapped the candies in parchment paper and stored them at room temperature for the best possible results.
Kit Kat Bar — The Center
You'd think that Kit Kat bars would be challenging because of their crunchy wafer filling, but we found a shortcut. For the filling in our recipe, we used Neapolitan chocolate wafers, stacked with chocolate cream, for a quick and easy fix.
Kit Kat Bar — The Recipe
For the coating, we melted chocolate over a double-boiler and coated each wafer with it. We made sure to first submerge the bottom, and then place the wafer on a baking sheet to drench the rest in chocolate. With the help of an Italian cookie, this British candy was successfully replicated and had us breaking off more pieces than we'd like to admit.
Pop Rocks — The Science Behind It
Not only are Pop Rocks one of our favorite candies, but we were also intrigued by the science of this recipe. The secret to the pop in Pop Rocks is citric acid, which we added to a boiling mixture of sugar and corn syrup.
Pop Rocks — Flexibility
Making Pop Rocks was fun because we could be flexible about the flavors and colors for each. We used a berry flavoring for this batch and blue food coloring.
Pop Rocks — Cracking Them Up
Everyone loves Pop Rocks because of their inconsistent, pebble-like qualities. After we spread the candy mixture onto a baking sheet and let it harden, we cracked it up into a Ziploc bag and had a therapeutic smashing session with a rolling pin.
Pop Rocks — The Recipe
Despite the boiling of candy, Pop Rocks were a pretty easy endeavor and this recipe yielded the same crackling sensation we've all come to know and love about the candy.
Charms Blow Pops — The Bubblegum
Many people know how to make lollipops, so why not get some bubblegum and make Blow Pops? To find out, we stuck pieces of bubblegum onto sticks and tried it out.
Charms Blow Pops — The Molds
For an easy way to mold our pops, we used silicon brownie mold pans to try and replicate the globe shape of a Blow Pop. While the shape isn't perfect, the molds' flat surface made it easy to rest the bubblegum sticks in them and fill them with the hot candy mixture.
Charms Blow Pops — The Candy
While there are many different flavors, few can resist the strawberry Blow Pops, so we used strawberry gelatin mix to help us get the flavor and color we desired.
Charms Blow Pops — The Recipe
While different in shape from the original, these pops are as close to the real thing as you'll get. If you disagree with us and have another favorite flavor, just swap out the gelatin mix for a different kind.
TWIX Bars — Baking
The most loveable part of the TWIX bar, the cookie, requires a little baking to recreate the candy. We worked off a traditional shortbread recipe and poured the batter into a glass baking dish to get a flat, even surface. Because this isn't the norm with baking shortbread, we poked holes on the surface to allow steam to escape while baking.
TWIX Bars — The Caramel
Everyone loves the caramel in a TWIX bar, and because of this we figured that there had to be a little extra something to it. Rather than just melting regular caramel, we mixed it with heavy cream to get an ultra-rich caramel filling.
TWIX Bars — The Recipe
Testing proved that our bars tasted just about as close as you can get to the real thing, and even better, they were almost double the size and cost less than half of the price of store bought TWIX bars.