The Art of Making Candy Canes

In the December preschool newsletter, the director shared of how she and her granddaughter had recently been to Logan's to watch them make candy canes. With out fascination for the show, Unwrapped, on the Food Network, I thought this would be a great and festive thing to do. So after calling and getting the details, that's what we did this evening.

The demonstration started off with us standing outside and watching through the window. The whole process from the start of flipping the sugary batch to the end of making 400 candy canes takes an hour and a half. The Candyman poured the sugary substance onto a large marble stone and flipped it and tossed it to have it cool evenly. He snipped a couple pieces out and added red dye to one piece and green dye to another. After that process, he put the bigger piece that he wanted to become the white of the candy cane onto this large hook on the wall and stretched it continually to add air bubbles and help make the sugar crystals form.Logan's make their candy canes with five thin stripes and one solid stripe. The next step was the Candyman cutting and piecing together the pieces of the five stripes. The batch is then stretched and pulled and cut to size. This size batch can produce over 400 candy canes! The red machine in the picture keeps the mixture warm so that it can be easily worked with through the whole process.The candy canes that were being made with this batch were cinnamon, and we were given warm samples! Which was were good!After the major part of the demonstration was done, you were free to wonder their store and of course purchase candy canes or other candy they make and sell. I happened upon this particular candy cane and purchased a few. The red ribbon reads "The heart of Christmas is Jesus!"It was a really neat outing, and at the end of the evening, Hannah said she enjoyed it and learned alot and couldn't wait to write about it in her journal at school tomorrow!