That balance of all five senses sort of as a tipping point where you can do just about anything With our candy.

We look back in time, we go back to the 1800s of Victorian period.

Many of our bits of equipment were made in that time period were pretty much the only one who has started up again using this sort of equipment, tracking it down and restoring it.

Today, we're gonna be making sugar plum drop candies, eggnog image candies and peppermint candy canes.

First we do the candy canes.

The first thing we do is we cook the sugar.

It's mixed with water and we're boiling all the water out.

We need to use two sugars to interrupt the crystallization process, sucrose and glucose.

If we just use sugar and water when it hardened it would turn back into table sugar and become granular.

We have a team of five candy makers here at lofty pursuits, hurry and jake.

Were working with me today.

Everybody in the store knows when we make peppermint candy because peppermint has a weird reaction to your skin, it makes you feel cool.

Anybody was in any way slightly congested or had any matter of allergies at this point, they will not after that £25 of candy canes only take less than an ounce of peppermint oil.

When we make candy with multiple colors in it, we add the food coloring on the table.

We do this so we can segment and separate the different areas of color.

One of our specialized tools doesn't look like it's a tool.

It's a giant table.

The top is made out of a half inch piece of steel and has a water circulation system in it.

We use it to rapidly cool the hot sugar where it comes in contact with the table will cool off quickly, but the bits not in contact don't cool that fast.

So by folding the candy together, we get to even out the heat and pick the temperature we want.

We may want to act more like a liquid or more like a solid or somewhere in between.

Alright, we're getting real close to stretched.

Next we make the amber sugar white.

This is a hand wrought iron hook.

It's thicker than most of the other hooks that we encountered.

This lets it radiate the heat better so the candy is less likely to stick to the hook.

We have several hooks in the store, but the one that I used today came from a store called millions, which was opened in 1848 in Cincinnati.

We changed the Amber into white.

We pulled it about 75 times each time we folded into trapped air bubbles on the inside.

Those air bubbles were great because those little round bubbles reflect light back out and the random light that they reflect appears white.

Then we start making the stripes on the heating table.

Make sure my stripes are super.

even in thickness.

Candy canes didn't always have stripes.

The first candy canes were white.

Actually, if you look at victorian greeting cards, which is the best way to look at the history of candy canes because they throw it up on them.

It wasn't until the late 1800s, the first stripes came out and this is partially because people thought of peppermint is white colour.

I'm just waiting for these to actually get stuck together.

One of the things about candy that we have to be careful with is the colors will migrate from one point to another in the candy canes.

If they're too hot, the red would actually bleed into the white parts of the candy and we don't want this to happen.

We do this by controlling the temperature and the only way we can really tell the temperature at this point is by feel.

We know how stiff the candy needs to be and that just comes with practice and we'll come mm hmm.

The batch roller twists the candy as it forces it down the taper.

We don't want it to go too far, but it's kind of useful in this case to a point because it puts a spiral on the candy cane first.

Candy cane is born.

We add a spiral with our hands, but we do it at the machine first.

Then we add the hook on the candy cane.

The hook on the top of the candy cane is made by bending it.

If you think of this, it's behaving like a tube.

The inside white is softer than the outside, so we have to bend it very carefully.

We use our hands in a very similar way to a tube bender that a plumber uses and then we have a little guide.

We use to make sure they're all a consistent size and that's how we make candy canes.

Next, we'll make the drop candy.

We start the process the same boiling the sugar and adding the flavor.

The sugar plum is a drop candy where everything is the same color.

Everything else we did use multiple colors because of this, we could cheat a little, we could add the coloring and the flavoring in the pot at the same time.

And when we poured it on the table we could pour it thinner and over a larger surface areas will cool faster.

It just speeds up the candy making process.

We can tell by the texture of the sugar, the temperature of the sugar and then we add the citric acid because citric acid will burn if the sugar is too hot and the citric acid is the acid that makes the flavors right?

Most of these flavors come with no acid in them and most fruits have acid in it.

It just gets like impossibly thin.

The problem with teaching candy making is it's all about touch.

The consistency changes constantly.

There's one point that we want to cut it.

We want to cut it when the outside is hard and the inside's still liquid so we can average out the temperatures.

You can see.

It's like starting to become a little bit more compact.

But then when we want to manipulate it, we wanted more of a clay consistency when we're doing the initial shape.

But we wanted to get harder to keep the shapes.

Once it's done, it went from a liquid to now it's behaving like a non newtonian fluid and that means that right now it's flowing like a liquid, but we put a lot of pressure in it.

It would behave like a solid.

I still have a pair of scissors from my great grandfather when he was a tailor and they probably took two weeks of salary to buy, but he kept them for a lifetime and he died before I was born.

The things that I own here for this candy making, I don't feel like I'm an owner of, I'm just a caretaker of because they're gonna be here generations after me and I have to preserve them for the candy makers that follow me.

This is 100 and 50 year old equipment.

The machine is a fruit drop roller.

We're doing this by passing the candy through it and getting out the shape at the other end.

Today we use the diamond shape.

The diamond candy not only looks pretty, but gives eight surfaces to be in your mouth.

So the flavor spreads faster so we like this for subtle flavors like the sugar plum.

These candy machines haven't changed much in the last 150 years.

They were developed by thomas mills in Brothers in philadelphia.

These machines are made out of cast iron.

They weigh 20 or £30 each and the rollers are solid bronze.

Everything needs to be non stick on this and like a cast iron skillet.

We've made a nonstick by working in oil to the surface.

I'm gonna pre cool some chunks over here.

The candy comes out of the machine onto the candy cooling table.

Water is being sprayed on the underside of the top.

You can't have water on the candy would make it sticky.

This freezes the candy in place as soon as it comes out of the machine, the rollers get it into the shape, but it's the table itself that cools it off.

We slide it across the table, but it's still behaving about the consistency of shoe leather.

It's not rock hard yet.

The sheet of candy comes out connected by sugar, which we call Flash.

The Flash holds the candy together when it comes to the machine, but now we need to get rid of it.

We need to break the pieces apart and we do that by dropping the candy.

The last thing we have to do is get rid of all the sugar dust.

The remnants of the Flash.

We have to do this because the candy under its own weight just like glass to a certain point will fuse back to itself.

Various candy makers use different things.

I just use an old friar that we bought for this purpose and that's how we make drop candies.

Finally, we'll make the eggnog cut rock image candy.

Okay, we start the process the same boiling the sugar and adding the flavor hard part.

I call it image.

Candy.

The correct term is cut Rocket was originally invented in Blackpool England.

It's also sometimes called blackpool rock mm smells like pink.

Blackpool rock is sold in a big piece with the art all the way through like a stick of rock and they call it.

What we're doing is we're taking into bite sized pieces, which is the cut rock part.

Okay, well let's go to the metal of the equipment is important.

All of our metal is mild steel, not stainless, stainless steel because of the very nature that makes it not rust is not magnetic.

Sugar likes to stick to things that are the same temperature as it and the table if it heats up, will become sticky to the candy.

The bars, if they heat up too much will become sticky to the candy with the image can be present.

We needed the inside to be cold because we needed to keep the detail in place.

I say we should move to the table right about now.

Nine pieces good.

I don't know if it's a little hot but we have time to cool it and I did this by cooling off the corners of the presence but we want the outside hader's that that candy can slide around it, share its heat and stretch it out to the image will scale.

Do you think that's enough for a little more?

One of the fun things about the image candy is, it's possibly the most creative candy we do and some of the most complex we have to create three dimensional art.

That's a good shape.

In the case of the present, we wanted the inside color of the president, the light blue to be opaque.

So when we put a clear blue wrap around it, light went through the clear blue bounced back out and hit your eye and look more spectacular.

Beautiful.

That technique is called Khoisan a little boxes.

We're making a little box for the light to bounce in and out and by tapering the circles of candy that I made sort of like candy straws that are filled with white candy.

I was able to make the illusion of a bow or make the shape of the bow because what good would it present without a bow.

But the bow's designed to be much taller than it ended up.

Yeah, I let the weight of the candy being a non Newtonian fluid.

Get its to its final shape.

Once we have the shape in the center, we pat it around with a white candy.

This is for two reasons.

One, it gets it away from the outer edge.

When the light goes through that rap on the edge of the present, it bounces back out at you.

Then we need to do an outer wrap of UNP pulled candy.

The pulled candy are like tiny little air bubbles.

So if we just cut the white candy, it might crumble, it might make a diagonal cut.

But if we wrap it in the non wrapped candy, non pulled candy, we're able to create an outer level that will produce a crack around it When we cut it and make smoother pieces.

Then we need to use gravity to make an even taper.

Our entire goal here is to make a three dimensional funnel of candy.

Mhm.

We learned how to stretch the image down and scale it without losing the detail without losing pieces and without it distorting, and that's what sometimes takes years to master.

Next.

We put the candy on the batch roller and we pull it before we had a batch roller, we had one person rolling the candy while one person was pulling it.

But now that person is replaced with high technology, high technology from about 1910.

And this batch roller spins the candy.

The candy is a non newtonian fluid.

If we just left that cylinder alone and we go flat and spread out over the entire table.

But by keeping it moving, we keep it as a solid object.

Then we have to pull it.

We have to pull it gently because we pull it too fast.

It will snap when it's thick.

So we're sort of pulling it down gently, scaling it with very, very even pressure.

We then cut the pieces.

We do this on our candle, a little candy anvil because we're sugar smith's.

This elevates it off the table and allows us to cut it with our chopper.

And the knife hits it really hard.

All the pieces become by size and each piece has an identical or nearly identical image in it.

Mhm.

People seem to forget that history isn't that far away and the future isn't either.

And we just sort of here in the middle being a caretaker for what's around us, ideas, people, friendships, loves.

And if we can remember that everything is as sweet as candy.

Okay, mm hmm.