The Idiot Girls' Lemon Drop Candy
“I hated PE in high school and paid the tallest girl in my class to forge a note with my mother’s fake signature on it that read, ‘Please excuse Laurie from all future activities involving sweating, perspiring, or getting hot. She has extremely weak pores, and perspiration will send her into cardiac arrest. Her doctors are working on it. Thank you, Mrs. Notaro.’”
Getting older is a weird thing. It's something everyone notices, but never really thinks about until, one day, it just throws on a fairy costume and slaps them in the face with hedge clippers.
We're getting older.
And we're stuck with two options: Try to stop it or embrace it and continue being our weird selves.
Laurie's book makes it clear which one she chose.
Her book is filled with words of wisdom, with do's and don't's. It's also one of the funniest books I've ever read. Like this gem: "Personally, I was more concerned with keeping Nana's ID bracelet on her wrist, lest we discover three years from now that we brought the wrong Nana home from the hospital and then have to share custody with another family" (82-83).
The tone of the book is bright, with a few bites to it. It's one that stays with you.
She even has an essay called, "Suckers."
Because of all of that, I wanted to make lemon drop hard candies.
They're sweet. They're tart. They're bright and colorful. They stay with you (unless you're a heathen and chew hard candies, instead of sucking on them).
While it only takes a few minutes and a couple ingredients to make these candies, there's a lot you need to know before you actually start making them.
You can't double this recipe. Technically you can, but you won't be able to work fast enough to mold, cut, and shape the candies before it's hard, and you'll be stuck with lemon glass that will rip through your cheeks and gums. I've done it, and it isn't fun.
You need kitchen shears, and you're going to need to coat them in butter.
You need a scraper, and you're going to need to coat it in butter.
You need a marble slab, and you're going to need to coat the top in butter.
Are you seeing a pattern yet?
When sugar starts cooling, and it cools fast, you don't want it to be sticking to everything. It's a pain to get off (you have to use really hot water), and it can ruin your candy. So the butter is really important. I used unsalted, because that's what I had in the fridge.
The marble is there to make sure the candy cools evenly. Pouring molten sugar onto just any surface is always a really bad idea, so you need something that will be able to stand up to the heat. Marble does that.
Back to the whole fast thing—It takes less than 5 minutes for these candies to go from a 300 degree liquid to rock hard and barely warm. In that time, you have to mix in citric acid, lemon extract, and food coloring, separate the ball into sections, roll them into logs, cut them, then shape the corners so you don't need stitches in your tongue when you're eating them. As soon as the sugar is cooked and you go to pour it on to your slab, be ready to move.
Common sense tells you that the sugar is going to be really hot when you're handling it. They do sell special gloves for normal people who don't feel like molding 200+ degree balls of sugar, and you can find them on Amazon for $12-24 (the price depends on the brand). I never said I was normal though, and I don't mind the heat, so I just use my hands.
Lemon Drops
-1/2 c white sugar
-1/4 tsp cream of tartar
-1/4 c water
-1/4 tsp lemon extract
-1 tsp citric acid
(Fun fact! You can either buy citric acid at a specialty store and get a little jar for $8-12 OR you can just go into the kosher section of your grocery store and pick up something called Sour Salt, which sounds much less scary than citric acid, but is actually the same thing. You can get a large shaker for about $3-5.)
-4 drops of yellow food coloring (you could really mess with people and use blue or green)
-powdered sugar to roll the candy in (about 1/4 c)
1. Coat the blades of your scissors, your scraper, and the marble with butter.
2. Get a plate and put some powdered sugar on it.
3. In a small saucepan over medium-high heat, whisk together the water, sugar, and cream of tartar. You only have to stir it occasionally after the sugar has dissolved.
4. Attach a candy thermometer. You want to stop cooking the sugar when it hits 300 degrees. At that point, the sugar should start turning yellow on it's own, so you want to take it off before it burns (that happens quickly, so make sure you're watching!).
5. Pour the boiling sugar on to the marble.
6. Sprinkle on the citric acid, lemon extract, and food coloring.
7. Using the scraper, fold the sugar in on itself a few times to mix everything together. You don't really have time to stop and check on things (hence the picture below being blurry), so just watch what you're doing as you're doing it.
8. Once the food coloring is all throughout the sugar, divide the candy into thirds. You can either divide all three sections at once, or you can do it as you go (doing it as you go can help it stay warm for a few extra seconds, so that's what I usually do).
9. Roll one of the sections into a long, thin, log shape.
10. Cut the log into small squares.
11. Using your fingers, round out the sharp edges.
12. Place each piece into the powdered sugar as soon as you're done rounding it out. The sugar will prevent them all from sticking together or sticking to anything you put them on.
13. Repeat steps 9-12 with the other two sections.
14. Completely coat all of the candy in the powdered sugar.
15. When you finish doing this, you want to get all of the excess sugar off, so I usually put them in a very small strainer and shake them around a bit.
The great thing about candy is that, unlike cupcakes or ice cream, it lasts longer than two days in my house. You can shove them into an old mint container or in a little Ziploc bag. You can even go buy fancy candy bags from Michael's. Or, you can do what I did and embrace your inner old lady by putting them in a really old floral saucer. (But maybe you shouldn't—apparently my great-grandmother used lead paint on this, and that's why we never use it. It's so pretty though.)
