A Sweet Reveal.

When I try new recipes, I admit I like to look for the easiest, simplest one.  I like to make sure that, on my first attempt, things come out at least reasonably well (read: edible) and that I can master the easy steps before challenging myself with the more complicated ones.

I've wanted to make Turkish Delight for ages.  It always goes down well in my house when someone opens a box of gooey, sugary goodness, delicately flavoured with rose or lemon.  So I searched and searched for a recipe and my heart sank a little bit; they all seemed so awfully complicated, taking hours to complete and making boiling sugar syrup and all sorts of scary things.  I mean, I'd need a candy thermometer.  Ack.

But I decided to bite the bullet.  The promise of Turkish Delight was much too alluring to pass up, so I gathered my ingredients, crossed my fingers and got to it.

From left to right, I used sugar (4 cups), a few drops of red food colouring, cream of tartar (1 tsp), icing sugar (1 cup), lemon juice (2 tsp), cornflour (1 and a quarter cups), rose water (2 tbsp) and not pictured is cold water (4 and a half cups).

The first thing to do was to line a dish with tin foil; all the recipes specified different dish dimensions but I don't think that matters.  It needs to be lined with tin foil, with a little overlapping the edges, so that it doesn't stick while it's setting and so you can use the foil as handles when taking it out.  Clever.

Next, I prepared the sugar syrup.  I'd never made sugar syrup before, or even used a candy thermometer, so it certainly was a learning curve for me.  I put 1 and a half cups of water, the 4 cups of sugar and the lemon juice into a pan over a medium heat, stirring until the sugar had dissolved.  Then I put in my candy thermometer and let it boil away (quite scarily) until it reached about 240 degrees F.  All of the recipes told me not to stir the sugar syrup while it was boiling.  So I didn't.

Fear-induced blur from boiling sugar

When the sugar syrup had reached about 225, I started on my second mixture.  Since traditional Turkish Delight is made without gelatine, I put the rest of the water, the cornstarch and the cream of tartar into a larger saucepan and whisked it until it was all lovely and smooth.

I then turned on the heat and allowed the mixture to boil, at which point it became very thick and gluey, like wallpaper paste.

Yum

Once the sugar syrup was at 240, the moment came that I had really been dreading; I had to pour the boiling sugar syrup into my cornstarch glue.  I had visions of being burned alive by scalding liquid sugar.  But with a steady hand and a thumping heart, I managed to successfully pour and mix the two together.  Huzzah!

At this point, there was a lot of conflicting information regarding how long you're supposed to simmer the mixture for and how often you're meant to stir it.  On a low simmer, I decided to let it cook for about an hour, stirring every 8-10 minutes or so.  That was not a great idea.

The mixture caramelised very quickly and because I wasn't stirring it enough, it burned like crazy on the bottom.  Cooking it for an hour would've been perfect if I had been stirring it for the whole hour, too.  So a tip would be to make sure you're stirring it very, very frequently.  This might mean standing by the oven for an hour but trust me, it's better than the smell of burning sugar and having to soak a saucepan for two days.  Yikes.

 Since I'd come so far, I decided to try and save as much of the Turkish Delight as possible.  I let the mixture cool to about 150, then added the food colouring and the rosewater and poured it into my tin foiled dish.

Once it had set a little, I sprinkled it all over with cornflour to help 'cure' it.  It also helped it not be so massively sticky when I turned it out a bit later that day and did the other side.

After leaving it overnight and well into the next afternoon, it was time to chop my Turkish Delight into little yummy squares.

Remember this picture?

I oiled a sharp knife and first sliced it into strips.  It was hugely sticky on all the un-cornfloured sides, so I had to wash and oil my knife a couple of times to chop it all up.

I dunked all of my little cubes into a pot of icing sugar and made sure they were thoroughly covered to stop them from sticking to each other.  They did look lovely; they reminded me of the Turkish Delight from the animated 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' film.  Do you remember that?

It's not recommended to keep it in an air-tight container as it has a tendency to sweat, so I put mine in an old shortbread tin between layers of baking paper, sprinkled with a generous amount of icing sugar.

It ended up tasting like candyfloss rather than roses, which was a little disappointing but I think probably because the mixture burned, oops.  Nonetheless, it tasted very nice and everyone liked it!  The texture is softer than I anticipated, a little gooey and melt-in-your-mouth-y.  It's very sweet so one or two pieces is more than enough to satisfy.

I like to think my first venture into Turkish Delight was a success and I'll definitely be making it again, only I won't burn it the next time!  Have you ever made anything like Turkish Delight?  I'd love to hear about your candy-making experiences.

Love, K.