Maple Candy

by Elizabeth Kelly

This week I thought I would try my hand at maple candy. I plan to volunteer to provide the sweet potato for our Christmas dinner this year - that is if we are able get together. I am looking for something beyond, more than what we would usually do, break the tradition mold a little this year, since tradition, normal, and usual seem to have gone out the window. Besides, if we can't together, at least I have something to occupy me.

I am experimenting three new ways to cook sweet potato, and I am not looking up any recipes. I want to let my imagination go. The only thing I am looking up is pairings, and there are so many wonderful things that go with sweet potato, maple syrup being one.

I have never made candy, and I don't know what made me think I could now. I don't even know what hard ball and soft ball stage means, only that I want hard candy so I went with the hard ball stage. I'll find out if it worked in a day or two it supposedly takes to harden and dry.

My original thought was to bake the sweet potato, halve it, scoop it out, mix is some spices, probably cinnamon, the scoop it back and sprinkled with pecans on, in my mind, the stylishly mounded sweet potato in the skin. Next, a decorative piece of maple candy, thin, almost translucent, standing up at one end, creating a piece of art as much as food.

I don't know what I thought would happen when the maple syrup reached the hard ball stage. I was going to drizzle it into intricate, delicate shapes, on the parchment or spoon out solid abstract shapes worthy of my creations.

Instead I ended up with was an irregular lattice of drizzled maple candy, of different widths, merging into blobs where they intersected. I was barely able to make a tear drop with the spoon before it ran in any direction it desired.

What I got was success, I think. I made candy, I hope. Maybe weird looking candy, but I was successful and I had fun. Next time I might do better. Next time I might try a mold, forget the sweet potatoes, and just wrap them up nicely as a gift. The new sweet potato tradition might then become whipped sweet potatoes, piped into rosettes instead.