Product Description

"...nearly 100 recipes for types of candies that will have no time to melt in your mouths....the author's contributions to the cookbook shelf are twofold: one, streamlining directions so that anyone can duplicate good results, and, two, creating enough variations to satisfy different palates....Kids can wield a thermometer and wooden spoon too, thanks to 26 special concoctions written for little hands and sweet teeth....Color photographs aplenty."--Booklist. "...[one] of the best cookbooks...a beautiful book that contains more than 100 recipes and simple instructions."--Chicago Sun-Times.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #307054 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Customer Reviews

Just another recipe book
If the title of this book had been "Making Basic Candies" instead of "Candy Making Basics", I might not have been as disappointed. Of course, I probably wouldn't have bought the book, either. As it is, though, instead of learning the basics of candy making, I got about 15 pages of discussion of some techniques followed by about 90 pages of recipes.

Plus, about 3/4 of the recipes were just variations on the other 1/4. The book did include recipes for a few of the basic pieces (butter, but not milk, caramel, marshmallows, and fondant, though it excluded nougat and marzipan for some reason, unless I just missed those pages), and they will be helpful to me, but they were pure recipes with no discussion of why you need to do anything.

For example, one recipe might say to bring a mixture to 238 degrees over medium heat while another says to do it over low heat. Why? What would happen if I boiled the latter over medium heat? Why must this kind of candy be stirred constantly for 22 minutes while that kind only needs occasional stirring? Why did she decide to add butter to the chocolate in the rocky road? What effect does it have? How do I control the texture of caramels? Why add chocolate to your fudge before heating instead of after?

Also, the author explicitly chose to omit all recipes requiring tempered chocolate. She included a number that call for chocolate flavored covering, though, which often left me wondering whether the chocolate flavored covering was there as a substitute for tempered choclate, or because it actually works better for the application.

The book also doesn't contain any information on common problems with the recipes, how to work around those problems, or even good definitions of basic terms (what exactly makes a fondant a fondant, anyway?)

I learned more about the basics of candy making from the sections on sugar and chocolate in "On Food and Cooking" (ISBN 0684843285) than I did from this book. I am really disappointed, because this is one of the few books I've found that purports to discuss the basics of candy making in a broad sense.

My next read on the subject will be "Candymaking" (ISBN 0895863073). It sounds like that book will be much closer to what I want.

Great candy making starter book
I LOVE candy and decided I'd like to make some of my own, instead of shelling out $20 per pound. This book is a terrific starter book. It has pictures of all the candy so you can see if yours turns out looking the same. It gives great tips and starter information for the beginner. There are all kinds of recipes for chocolates, caramels, hard candies, soft candies, caramel corn, etc. The book even has recipes for making your own marshmallows and sweetened milk, in case you don't have any. I am really enjoying this book alot and may even buy another copy for a gift.

Not really candy
I wasn't impressed with this book and here is why. The layout was boring, the directions were scanty; offered in the front of the book only. There wasn't much of an introduction at all and there was no ending. The recipes offered covered fudge, toffee, cereal snacks, but most of these were variations of one common recipe: ex- basic chocolate fudge, then choc-mint fudge, cho-coffee fudge..this sort of thing. The maple fudge recipe has no maple in it. Some of the recipes were not even what I would classify as candy since they were made from cooking corn syrup and cereal together. There was way too much emphasis on using sweetened condensed milk, confectioners sugar,and chocolate coatings. The title was inaccurate. It should of been called "quick and easy sweets". There is not much about real candy making methods in this book at all.

I gave this book 2 stars because the photos were good (the identification charts were not) and for the occasional recipe that beckoned. I don't recommend.