Good Question: Candy Recipes for County Fair Time?

Here's a really fun question from Merry123, who writes:

We're in search of really good candy recipes that will hold up in shape, appearance, and taste in warm weather for my older kids (preteen/teens) to make for county fair projects. In past years they've made fudge, mocha truffles, candied orange pecans, chocolate covered marshmallows from the Martha Stewart website, and pâtes de fruit. They're open to new ideas and challenges.

Well, we have quite a lot of candy recipes in our archives, Merry! Maybe one of them will offer inspiration? Here's a big list we compiled last Christmas:

• Candy for Giving and Party Snacks: The Full Roundup

Here is our whole archive of candy recipes, too. The two recipes pictured above are:

• Ginger Cinnamon Caramels
• Chocolate Orange Truffles

What about a caramel candy? Caramel is a great skill to learn, and there's so much in the process to learn about caramelization, how sugar is heated, and what the stages are. Perhaps they could make three kinds of caramel: a very soft taffy, a firmer flavored caramel, and a brittle toffee, to demonstrate their mastery of the subject.

Readers, do you have any suggestions?

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(Images: Faith Durand)

Comments (3)

Your kids sound pretty talented, Merry - I'd suggest, if they're up to the challenge, for them to try macarons (lots of recipes on the tartelette blog). If they turn out they'd definitely be impressive at the fair, if not at least the kids would (probably) at least have fun trying :)

Maybe this is too easy for them, but what about Buckeyes? Instead of peanut butter they could try some exotic nut-butters, like hazelnut or macadamia. Sometimes a small amount of paraffin - seriously - is called for to be melted in with the chocolate to be used to coat Buckeyes. This is to make the melting point higher. There are chocolate bars shipped to American troops in the Middle East that have a high melting point - probably pretty waxy!

I was thinking the other day how fun it could be to make a sort of smores-bonbon. A base of graham cracker, with marshmallow stuck to it, coated in chocolate, maybe? Or something like rocky road, with pieces of graham crackers instead of nuts?

Also, cake-pops are trendy, and offer a lot of room for creativity. The online recipes and how-tos seem to call for canned frosting and "candy melts" but if your kids prefer to cook from scratch (the candies they've made so far sound so impressive!), they can come up with something grand.

Oh, one more - Rice Krispy Treats are a perennial favorite and have a lot of variations. After reading this entry at Cakespy.com I had to try making the Trix ones, they look so cool! And they were fun to eat. I'll bet they'd be hot sellers at a county fair just because they look so neato.