Not enough holiday stress? Make candy!
(Originally published December 2022)
Are you looking at the few remaining hours before Christmas thinking, “What else can I squeeze into this already frenetic week to add even more chaos to the holidays?”
I have an idea: Try making caramels.
I do it every December as part of my life’s mission to work harder, not smarter. What more ridiculous time is there than now to spend hours making a treat from scratch that you could just buy, ready-made, at the store?
Making caramels is, in theory, straightforward: You combine the ingredients—cream, butter, sugar, and vanilla—in a saucepan and boil the mixture until it reaches the appropriate temperature (245–250 degrees F). Then you pour the gooey concoction into a baking pan to cool. Last, you cut the firm caramel into bite-size pieces and wrap each one in a square of waxed paper.
“Hot, molten caramel is a marvelous exfoliant, by which I mean splattering any on your bare forearm will take the skin right off.”
In reality, however, caramel making can be tricky. But, as I always say about holiday traditions, if it’s not challenging, time consuming, and potentially dangerous, why do it?
Although you can use a candy thermometer to tell you when the caramel is ready, it’s not that simple. You have to adjust the target temperature based on variables including how many feet above sea level you are and what year your house was built.
Old-timers swear by a simpler method: dropping a blob of caramel mixture into a cup of cold water and then squeezing the lump to see if it’s “pliable” or “firm” or “reticent” or “inscrutable” (these terms are also printed on the thermometer, like a Rosetta stone for candy making).
Once you reach the desired adjective, you stop. And over time most people—not me—develop a good sense of when the caramel is done, both by the color and thickness of the mixture and by how bad their backs hurt from hunching over the stove watching the red line in the thermometer not move a millimeter.
Hot, molten caramel is a marvelous exfoliant, by which I mean splattering any on your bare forearm will take the skin right off. On the bright side, cursing and writhing around the kitchen in agony will break up the monotony of waiting hours for the caramel temperature to rise even one degree.
But be careful. As soon as you take your eye off the thermometer to, say, tend to your burns, the temperature will shoot up 20 degrees in 30 seconds and overcook the batch. It’s this kind of unpredictability that turns caramel making into the perfect Yuletide sleigh ride of stress.
I ruined my first batch of the season by using a too-large pan; the caramel mixture wasn’t deep enough to register properly on the thermometer. I waited. I waited some more. Food scraps on the counter turned into compost, and still I waited.
No matter how much time passed, the thermometer wouldn’t read above “indifferent.” But when I finally tried the cold-water method, I found that the now-gingerbread-colored caramel had actually reached the “indestructible” stage usually reserved for making musket balls.
We found later that, rather than cut the cooled candy into pieces, which would have required power tools, we could just pick up the 9-by-13 slab and slam it on the counter, shattering it like dropped china. The resulting candy was intense and flavorful, but the consistency was more suitable for a DIY filling-removal experiment than for consumption. We chose to just suck on the pieces and save our teeth for less dangerous pursuits, such as opening beer bottles.
I recommend waiting until Christmas Eve to make caramels, because that’s when time is running out and you’ll be at your most frazzled.
Of course it’s possible that everything will go smoothly and you’ll manage to make a lovely batch of caramels on Christmas Eve Day, with hours to spare. “That was actually … easy,” you say, with a slight frown.
But wait: It’s not over.
The average 9-by-13 baking pan yields a Christmas miracle of several thousand caramels. So don’t worry about Christmas Eve being too relaxing; when Santa shows up at 2 a.m., you’ll still be at the kitchen table wrapping candies.
Merry Christmas. And you’re welcome.
