Homemade Blue Raspberry Jolly Ranchers

A few weeks ago, out of the blue, Spud asked me if we could make homemade Jolly Ranchers.  Since I’ve made sugar glass for cakes before, I thought it couldn’t be that much more difficult to make hand candies, so I told him we’d give it a try!

Our first hurdle was the flavoring.  Spuds favorite are the blue Jolly Ranchers, so we needed to find “blue”  flavoring…and the right type of flavoring I might add.  For this we needed flavor oil, more concentrated than the extracts I typically have in my pantry and oil based rather than alcohol based.  So I started researching, found a brand and ordered the oil.

Then it was go time….and it failed….epically.  Things looked promising and then we watched our beautiful blue turn brown and our candy take on an acrid scent.  Yep, scorched.  I figured I must’ve misread my thermometer and kept it on the heat too long.

So we tried again.  I pulled the candy a little sooner and things looked great for a minute, then the beautiful blue slowly turned green.  The flavor was better that time, but actually a bit too strong.

So I went back to the drawing board and started some more research to try to figure out what went wrong.  And I discovered, while prowling through comments on candy posts that it likely was a temperature issue.

The tricky bit is that I had to get the candy hot enough (to hard crack stage) for the jolly ranchers to set up correctly, but cool it, just a bit, before adding the flavor and food coloring which are susceptible to scorching.

And so, the third time was the charm (and I was really hoping so because by this point we were running low on flavoring).  I brought the sugar to hard crack stage, then let it cool just enough before adding the flavoring and we had a winner!

Spud was thrilled and loved taking the candy to school the next day to share with his buddies (and let me tell you, 15-year olds are very impressed with homemade candy making!)

Homemade Blue Raspberry Jolly Ranchers

Adapted from Celebration Generation

Candy

1 ½ cups white sugar

¾ cup white corn syrup

6 tablespoons water

Flavoring

¾ teaspoon flavor oil (I used blue raspberry)

½ teaspoon citric acid

1-2 drops gel food coloring

Line a baking sheet with parchment.

Place the sugar, corn syrup, and water in a medium saucepan on medium-high heat.  Cook until the sugar melts and reaches 300 degrees F (hard crack stage on a candy thermometer).  You can stir the mixture occasionally at the beginning when the sugar is melting, but leave it be as the temperature increases.

Once the sugar reaches 300 degrees, remove from heat and allow it to cool to 270 degrees F.  Quickly stir in the flavoring, citric acid, and food coloring.

Stir until mixed, pour onto a parchment lined baking sheet.  Cool for a few minutes, until the candy is malleable, but not hard, then cut with a large knife.  Cool completely and break apart.