Handmade process
How a batch of candy gets made, start to finish
There are seven stages between a sack of sugar and a wrapped lollipop, and only one of them can be rushed without anyone noticing. Here is the whole sequence, including the parts that occasionally go wrong.
The short version
Forty minutes of attention, then an overnight wait.
A single cook takes about forty minutes of continuous work at the slab, plus an hour of setup and a night of curing. We do two cooks on a good day and one on a day when the humidity is against us — which, in Minneapolis in July, is most days.
Nothing about the process is secret. The recipes are, because that is the pleasure of the shop, but the method is the same method any careful candy maker uses, and we are happy to explain it while you watch.
Step by step
Seven stages, in the order they happen.
Sourcing the week
Cane sugar, glucose, water and flavour. That is the whole list at the start of a cook. We buy sugar in 50-pound sacks and flavourings in small bottles, because a bottle that lasts two years is a bottle we have stopped paying attention to.
Cooking to temperature
Sugar and glucose go into a copper kettle with water and come up slowly. The number we care about is on a thermometer, not a timer: pull it early and the candy will be soft and cloudy, late and it will taste of caramel whether you wanted that or not. The Quiet Bee is the only one we deliberately take past the point where most shops would stop.
Colour, poured in stripes
Every colour we use is mixed into its own small batch of syrup, then poured onto the marble in stripes alongside the clear. Nothing is painted on afterwards. What you see in a finished lollipop is the inside of the candy, which is why the pattern survives to the last bite.
Folding and pulling
The striped slab is folded over itself, again and again, until the layers thin into lines. This is where the air gets in, and the air is what makes the surface satin rather than glassy. It is also where a batch can be ruined in about fifteen seconds if the sugar cools too far.
Shaping and sticks
The pulled rope is cut, rolled into discs or pressed into moulds, and the birch sticks go in while the candy is still soft enough to grip them. The pyramids for Snowline Sherbet are pressed by hand into the glassblower's mould, twelve at a time.
Curing overnight
Finished pieces rest on parchment in a dry room overnight. Candy that goes straight into a bag while it is still warm will sweat in the bag, and sweating is what turns a clear lollipop cloudy at the edges. We would rather lose the shelf space than the clarity.
Wrapping, weighing, labelling
Every bag is weighed and every box is counted by hand. Labels carry the candy name, the batch date and our contact details. If something is not right when you open it, that date is how we find the batch it came from.
What goes wrong
The three failures we see most.
Cloudy edges. Usually warmth and moisture meeting too early — candy bagged before it finished curing, or a humid week with the window open. It does not affect how the candy tastes, but we still do not sell it as a first.
Colour bleeding. Two syrups poured too close in temperature will merge where they meet, and a sharp stripe turns into a smear. Copper Comet has no stripes poured closer than an inch apart for exactly this reason.
Flavour flattening. Some flavours fade when sugar is hot for a long time. That is why the orange in Copper Comet goes in late, and why we do not attempt a fresh citrus candy in the middle of summer.
Humidity is the real boss
Hard candy is hygroscopic: it pulls moisture out of the air. Above roughly 55% relative humidity, a batch can start to go tacky within a day of being made. We keep a hygrometer on the wall and simply do not cook on the worst days. If your own kitchen is humid, the storage notes in our journal article on keeping candy clear will be more useful than anything we can tell you here.
What you will not see here
No automated lines, no painted-on colour, no flavour sprayed onto a finished shell. Also no health claims: this is sugar, made well, and it is a treat rather than a supplement.
“You can taste whether someone was paying attention. That is not a romantic idea, it is just what happens when sugar spends forty minutes being watched.”
Ellis RademacherRead further
Two articles that go with this page.
The journal covers the parts of the process that are useful to anyone who buys candy, not just to people who make it.
Next batch
Tell us what you would like us to make.
We take requests by email rather than through a shopping cart, because every batch is planned by hand. Send us a note and we will confirm flavours, quantity, price and a pick-up or shipping date.