Candy Glass: Perfect for Halloween cupcakes. Or anytime (I guess?)

Every year there is a charity bake sale and raffle at my work to celebrate Halloween.  Just so you know, this is probably my single favorite day of work in the entire calendar year.  OK.  Not probably.  It is *definitely* my favorite day!

I always make things for the bake sale that are a little bit over-the-top because I figure that:

1. Each one can be priced higher and thus make more money
2. People might want to buy something they can't make themselves
3. I make it a challenge and I get to try things out that I would never, ever make for just myself

In the past 5 years I've made all kinds of things, including chocolate cupcakes topped with tiny chocolate "dead" trees looming over a cookie gravestone and a molded chocolate coffin filled with white chocolate skulls.  In other words, I go a little bit crazy.

This year I wanted to make something different than ever before.  Looking around online, I found lots of people with photos of bloody cupcakes stabbed with broken candy glass. Heck, even Martha Stewart had a version.

Note: Tons of people not making these cupcakes also had instructions for the glass.  Weirdly, most of them were for blue glass and they were related to theme parties for either Disney's Frozen or Breaking Bad.  (Pretty much on opposite ends of the entertainment spectrum, huh?)    

I decided in making my cupcakes that a few things were really important, and most of them had to do with the candy glass.  (I'll talk about the cupcake manufacture in another post, promise.)  I wanted my glass to be flavored, not just sugar.  Because plain-sugar flavor isn't that interesting.  I also wanted it to be brown.  Both because it would show up better against the frosting and because clear glass could be from all kinds of things, but brown is probably from some kind of bottle.  It's nice to have a story behind my cupcakes, but nobody says that has to be a classy story, right?

Anyway, candy glass turned out to be pretty easy to make.  The vital part is the candy thermometer...or if you are me, the awesome thermometer-spatula that you got as a gift!

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup light corn syrup
• 1/2 cup water
• optional: 1 to 2 tsp. flavoring (I used coffee)
• optional: food coloring

Instructions

1. Spray a 13 x 9 jelly roll or cake pan with PAM spray.  No, like REALLY spray it.  
2. Combine all the ingredients in a sauce pan and heat over a medium-high heat.
       
3. Stir until sugar is dissolved and mixture starts to boil.
   
4. Once the mixture is boiling, stop stirring.
   
5. If you want to color/flavor, add now and the bubbles will work to distribute it without stirring.  (I added about 1 tsp coffee flavor extract at this time and it worked to color as well.)
   
6. As soon as the mixture hits 300 degrees, take the pan off the heat.
     
7. Let it sit for just a few seconds while it stops boiling.  (This probably isn't a great idea, but I added another tsp. of coffee extract at this time and stirred it in.  It foamed up pretty good for a few seconds, but ultimately worked.)
      
8. Pour the mixture out into prepared pan.
   
9. Let candy sit until completely hardened and cooled.  At least a few hours.
   
10. Break up the candy.  I used the metal end of a kitchen spoon, because it was small and I wanted shards.  If you are looking to make smaller pieces of candy, you might want to use a mallet or something with a larger surface area.  

And here are the cupcakes, stabbed with glass but before the "blood" was added.  Yeah, you're right.  They look WAY cooler when they are "bleeding!"