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Dessert

Colored Rock Sugar

Colored Rock Sugar is a candy made by boiling clarified sugar and mixing with icing and color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Colored Rock Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar

  1. In a deep copper pan, boil the clarified sugar until it reaches a nearly barley sugar consistency.

  2. Remove from heat and quickly stir in the icing until well mixed.

  3. For color, mix cochineal or any other color with the icing before adding it to the sugar.

Shape and finish

  1. Pour the mixture into a paper-lined sieve.

  2. Once cooled, break it into pieces of your desired size.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Clarified sugar
Forms the crystalline candy base that sets into hard rock sugar pieces.
Icing
Stirred in at the end to help the sugar crystallize and turn opaque.

The step that matters

Stirring in the icing quickly after removing from heat. Sugar boiled to barley sugar stage is very hot and can set or crystallize unevenly if the icing is delayed. Adding it promptly and mixing well keeps the crystallization even across the batch.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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