Want to be a taste-tester?

photo by Kevin Keeker

We are experimenting with our lollipop recipe and we need your help!

Specifically, if you live in Seattle or the surrounding areas (or will be visiting Seattle - we don't discriminate), we will be distributing Salted Caramel lollipops that are made with 2 different sugars. We need you to eat them both - a hardship, we know - and then tell us what you think! Which one tastes better? Do they taste different? Which one is less sticky? We want to know!

The details:
When: Monday April 9th & April 16th, 4pm - 7pm
Where: The Wandering Cafe, 7533 Lake City Way NE, Seattle, WA
(You can RSVP to the Facebook event if you're a Facebook user.)

We'll give you the 2 lollipops, a small paper with some questions, and you'll email us your answers by May 1st. It's that simple.

Thanks for your help!

The fine print: no more than two sets of samples per customer. Any recipe changes won't happen until 2013. At this time, we can't ship samples to customers.

What Kate & Susan are Talking About

It's a short one this week. We've been busy. Have a happy Easter weekend!

These eggs are AMAZING.

Did you know that wikipedia has a list of Finnish Hockey Players?

10 Things I Never Knew About Cardamom

photo by Kevin Keeker

I had the fabulous fortune to stumble onto #SpiceChat on twitter yesterday. It's a monthly chat about various spices. Yesterday's conversation was all about cardamom. I encourage you to go read the whole thing, there are A LOT of delicious looking recipes and ideas. One account in particular, MySpiceSage, sprinkled a bunch of cardamom facts. Here are the ones I never knew before:

1. Cardamom is the third most expensive spice after vanilla & saffron.
2. In the Middle Ages, cardamom was so dear, a scoop of pods equalled a commoner's wage for a year.
3. Cardamom pods don't ripen all at once and require many passes through a field for harvesting, which makes it so expensive.
4. Cardamom has the respected distinction of being known as "Queen of Spices" because of its beautiful aroma and flavor.
5. Cardamom is a plant in the ginger family & cardamom spice goes really well with ginger.
6. Cardamom contains more than 25 volatile oils that account for its unique aroma and flavor.
7. Cineole is a volatile oil found in cardamom and bay leaves. It smells like eucalyptus and has antioxidant properties.
8. Black cardamom has a completely different flavor from green. Bolder, peppery with smoky notes from being dried over fire. (I actually didn't even know that black cardamom existed.)
9. Cardamom is considered a sign of hospitality in Arab cultures, and it's added to the coffee of guests as a gesture of goodwill.
10. The region in Southern India where cardamom grows is named Cardamom Hills.

Have a Lollipop

Seriously, what are you waiting for? :-)

photo of Susan by Kevin Keeker

Discounts for Events

Event planners, brides & grooms know that gourmet lollipops make delicious, memorable wedding favors – and now we’ve made it easier to order a lot of lollipops all at once. Whether it’s for your wedding or another special occasion, you can now order 8 dozen lollipops in one single listing from our Etsy shop. And we’ll only charge you for 7 dozen. Pretty awesome.

photo by Kevin Keeker

All you have to do is tell us which flavors you want. It can be 8 different flavors, 8 dozen of a single flavor, or any combination in between. Of course if you need more than 8 dozen handmade lollipops for your event, let us know and we’ll hook you up.

And if you’re looking to splurge on some personalization, we still offer our custom lollipop label service – give us a few weeks’ lead time and we’ll put your initials on the labels in place of the flavor name. Snazzy!

Equipment Check

There’s a saying, “it’s a poor worker who blames her tools”. Meaning, your craft skills are more the determinant of the quality of your final product than your tools are. That’s in line with what Kung Fu Chef says about the lamb chops he recently prepared in New Zealand…

Even so, there’s something to be said for being able to trust one’s equipment. I was recently experimenting in my home test kitchen and I started to suspect that one of my cheap-o candy thermometers was not accurately reporting the syrup temperature. I tested its accuracy by putting it in boiling water and what do you know! It read about 218 degrees F – six degrees higher than it should have.

When I cooked my next a batch of syrup I grabbed a digital thermometer that I trust more, and used them both. Interestingly, their readings tracked each other pretty well – within a few degrees of each other – until around 290 degrees when the the glass thermometer’s reading started to climb a lot faster.

This is a really big deal, because lollipop syrup must be cooked to what’s called the ‘hard crack stage’ which occurs at 302-310 F. My glass thermometer reading would have encouraged me to take the syrup off the stove too soon – and my lollipops would have been too soft and bendy because they would have too much water left in them.

I used the cold water test as a backup method for gauging the syrup’s temperature, and confirmed that my digital thermometer was more accurate than the glass one. I guess I had better stick to using the digital one from now on!

So if you’re making candy, it’s a good idea to occasionally check the accuracy of your thermometer – at sea level, it should read 212 F in boiling water and 32 F in ice water. Happy candy making!