Homemade Candy Corn and Candy Pumpkins

You know how fruit always tastes so much better when you pick it fresh from the tree? Well, we discovered the same thing is true for candy corn - minus the tree, of course.

Our gumdrop supply was running a little low, and my oldest was having a listless sort of afternoon, so we decided to tackle another one of the recipes from our "must try" file. Given the season, candy corn seemed like a logical choice, though in truth, it has never been one of my personal favorites. All that has changed now though, thanks to a recipe we found at the Homemade Dessert Recipes site.

It's a pretty simple process. Just boil corn syrup, sugar, and butter for five minutes.

Stir in a little vanilla, and a mixture of powdered sugar, powdered milk, and salt.

Add some food coloring, and knead the dough until smooth. We started out using thin gloves, to keep from dyeing our hands, but I found the gloves a little awkward to work with, and chose to go without. It's not the first time this week I've had multi colored hands anyway.

Once the dough was smooth, we rolled it into thin ropes, and pressed them side by side, in the desired color pattern.

Then, we cut them into triangles with a sharp knife, and smoothed them out a little more by hand. Cutting them this way, half of them ended up upside down, as far as the colors go, but they still looked very candy cornish.

The dough was pretty stiff, and rolling it into ropes proved a bit difficult for the children, so we switched to making pumpkins, instead, by forming the orange dough into balls, and sticking on a tiny bits of green dough for stems. They were a lot easier to make, and they are just as tasty.

When my husband got home, I had a difficult time convincing him our little treats were homemade. They have a texture very much like the store bought candy. And the flavor, as I mentioned, is just like candy corn - only so much better.

It's great to be a homeschooler.