Whoopsie Daisies!

For a while, Jason had a bag of jujubes (hard gummy candy) at his place and I'd have one or five when I wanted a little sugar boost.  

I don't particularly like jujubes all that much but they seemed to work for me and so I started buying my own.  Weirdly... seeing as I don't love them?

For reasons that are unknown to me, eating jujubes on the regular starting to hurt my gums.

I assume it is something in the chemical makeup of the jujubes (?) and so I googled to see if you could make them at home and it turns out you can!

I found a really simple, straightforward recipe and bought some gelatin and a thing of strawberries.  "Easy peasy here goes nothing!" I thought.

I mentioned I was doing this to C-Dawg and she was like wait jujubes hurt your gums?  (yup, weird, I know) and also "well that's a waste of strawberries!" which... probably (especially with the price of fruit these days) but if I could have chemical free jujubes at home that tasted like summer strawberries?  WIN WIN, right?  (The recipe really is just essentially the gelatin, the pureed and strained fruit and sugar.)

So before this heat wave hit, I went ahead and followed the recipe to give it a try making my own jujubes.

Now I've heard before that making candy is really quite tricky and precise but I wasn't making candy see?  I was making jujubes!  And the recipe was SUPER super simple so I wasn't worried at all.  Plus, I'd made gummies before and figured jujubes were probably just a little more solid than them so it'd be more than fine.

Except.... when it came to the portion that said "get to a boil, cover for five minutes", well... that's where things started to be not so easy/great!

Within a moment of putting that lid on the pot (and I didn't have it at a huge boil mind you) the concoction started to boil over.

Now, this isn't like pasta water boiling over, this is thick, gooey, sugar goo boiling over directly on to a hot burner where it then sticks and burns.  Oh no.

I could have just abandoned the whole thing at the first overflow but I felt like I'd invested a fair amount into this (financially for sure!) and wanted to see how it would end up and maybe this was just normal?  So I kept taking the lid off to cool things and then trying to not have it boil over but also cook and then clean up from around the ring and at the end of the five minutes I had a disaster of a pot and an oh dear lord did I just ruin my burner? of a stovetop.  

Y'all, it wasn't pretty.  

But I persevered.... poured the mixture into the prepared pan and went to work cleaning up the sticky messy pot and stovetop.  And once things cooled enough, I googled how to clean burnt sugar off of a stove burner and I got to work on that.  (While trying not to ruin the burner!)

I got the burner pretty clean (baking soda mush) and tried to burn off any leftover residue and then made the executive decision to change out that burner to the less used area and hope for the best.  (I don't know how you buy a new burner but I assume you can?)

Meanwhile the jujube mixture was setting, waiting to be cut.

I decided to let it sit and set overnight so in to the fridge it went.

The next morning I brought it out to try cutting it up and try it and.... well, it wasn't solid.

I scooped out a bit and the texture was weird?  It wasn't jello but it wasn't jam so it was somewhere weirdly in between?  I guess it tasted fine but I wasn't drawn to the jam-jello enough to really want to eat it and I was kind of bummed that the simple recipe had failed me!

I scooped it out in slices and put it in a container in the fridge to harden it back up.

The next day I took a look at that container and the stuff had sweated.  There was a ton of liquid in the container.  WHAT HAD I MADE?

I composted most of it a couple of days later and told myself it was a lesson learned.  I have eaten some of it, but the texture doesn't work for anything (it's all too in between) and the strawberry-ness isn't quite the same as when I make strawberry sorbet so it wasn't worth forcing myself to eat it all.  Plus the liquid... felt creepy or something science-y I didn't understand!

So I guess the recipe I found wasn't detailed enough and all those who say making candy at home are right and I won't be attempting again.

I don't know when I'll go through another jujube phase, what with the sore gums and all but lesson learned I suppose.  Sorry strawberries, thank you for your sacrifice!

P.S.  After writing this I googled for another recipe and yeah the one I used was just way way too simple - but I'm also not going to try again but if you ever want to, look for the recipes with fancy ass instructions, eh?