Amazing Candy/Junk Food Things That You Should Buy For Me For Christmas - Ninjabread Kit

I can't tell you the fun I'd have making and eating these cookies.

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A Christmas/Halloween Cookie Thing

These gingerbread men are scary.

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Christmas Themed Gummy Ideas

Merry Christmas Everyone!

During this holiday season I've been snacking on all kinds of amazing holiday treats.  From fruit cakes, cookies, and a huge variety of chocolates, I've been stuffing my tummy full of all kinds of sweets.  There is one sweet however that's been noticeably absent from my holiday munching menu, gummies.  It seems like gummies, the most versatile of all candies, has been left out of the holiday selection.  There are a few out there, but not that much.  I believe that there's plenty of room for gummies during the holidays, and so I've decided to design a few fun gummy holiday treats myself.  These gummies aren't just guimmies shaped like elves, Santa, or any other Christmas themed tchotchke.  These treats use the gummy texture to their benefit.

As always, I invite any candy maker out there to use my ideas for free. All I ask is that if you make any of these, please be kind enough to send me some to try.

The first gummy treat on this list I'm surprised no one has thought of yet, gummy Christmas ornaments. Hanging candy on a Christmas tree is already a thing with candy canes, so why not go further.  With gummy ornaments you also don't have to worry about broken glass.  If one of these hits the floor you'll just get a subtle splat sound.  Sure you might not eat any of the ornaments that have hit the ground, but you don't eat most of your candy canes either, so it's no big deal.

The next gummy idea for the holidays is gummy ribbons.  Tearing open a gift on Christmas morning is one of the best feelings ever.  The only thing that really gets in the way is the ribbon.  You can't gracefully remove a ribbon from a Christmas gift.  In fact I'd say that the ribbon is more of a frustrating challenge, and who wants that on this day that should be full of happiness.  Gummy ribbons would be much easier to break through, and it would give you some sugar energy as you're opening all of your other gifts.

The last holiday gummy ideas is not gummy gingerbread men, it's gummy gingerbread men icing.  Recently I tried to bake some gingerbread cookies, and it all went pretty well, until I had to ice the cookies.  As it turns out, icing things with any kind of accuracy is not an easy task.  Gummy gingerbread decorations would simplify this task greatly.  You simply bake your cookies, and lay on the decorations.  If the cookies are a little bit warm the gummy should melt just a bit and stick to the cookie.  You could use all kinds of flavours and colours of gummy to make so many different designs.

So there you have it, gummies for Christmas.  Maybe you'll see it in a store near you next holiday season. If you do see any of these, let me know.

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Candy Critic Dessert Club – Something For The Holidays - Gingerbread Snowmen

What says happy holidays better than a plate full of gingerbread cookies?  These might be the only cookies that are exclusive to this holiday.  Shortbread cookies, the other holiday cookie, are also fairly popular at other times of the year, but you don't really see gingerbread in the summer, spring, or fall.  When I first thought about making these cookies, I figured that I would have a simple batter cookie recipe, with a few extra spices added in, I was wrong.

The ingredients:

1 Cup of brown sugar (Granulated worked for me)
1/3 Cup vegetable shortening
1 and 1/2 cups of molasses (dark for a richer cookie, light for a lighter tasting cookie)
2/3 cups of cold water
7 cups of Flour
2 teaspoons of baking soda
2 teaspoons of ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt

Frosting
4 cups powdered sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
4 tablespoons half-and-half
1 drop blue food colouring

The first things you have to do is blend the brown sugar, shortening, molasses and water together.  I thought it would be "faster" to use a beater to do this. I thought that the shortening would blend better with the other ingredients using electric beaters, I made a horrible mistake.  The water and molasses blend gives you watery molasses, and the minute my beaters were turned on in this mix, I coated everything within a 5 foot radius with small brown spots of molasses. Even after I tried to continue to blend this mixture, I found that the shortening didn't really "blend" at all, but it kind of turned into very small clumps of vegetable fat floating in brown liquid.  So I would just suggest using a spoon and a little patience.

After these ingredients are fairly well blended, add one cup of flour and the baking soda, and mix until incorporated (using a spoon is fine).  Then add the ginger and one cup of flour, and mix until incorporated.  Then add the allspice and one cup of flour and mix until incorporated. Then add the cinnamon and one cup of flour and mix until incorporated. Add the ground cloves and one cup of flour and mix until incorporated. And you guessed it, add the salt and one cup of flour and mix until incorporated.  Finally gradually add the rest of the flour.  This system allow each ingredient to be mixed in fairly well.  The last bit of flour might be easier to mix in with your fingers instead of a spoon.

Take your very large lump of gingerbread cookie dough and put it in the refrigerator for a few hours.  After it's rested in the refrigerator, take it out and decide how many cookies you want.  For me, this makes at least two batches of cookies, so you can return half of the cookie dough to the refrigerator or freezer for future use.  On a flowered surface knead the dough you have out a little, then roll it flat, about 1/4 of an inch.

To cut out the snowmen shape, Allison came up with the brilliant idea of using a glass, and several drink measuring tools.  We cut out each shape using these glass and drink measures, and smooshed the circles together.  It made for slightly squashed snowmen, but that made them more realistic.  Put your snowmen on a greased cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes.

Let the cookies cool for at least 30 minutes, and while they're cooling you can make the icing.  This icing is very simple to make.  Take the powdered sugar, vanilla, and half and half, and mix in a bowl.  You can add a little extra cream if you find the icing to be a little too thick.  Add the one drop of blue food colouring to give the white a slightly frosty feel, and stir it all up.

When the cookies are cool, use a piping bag and decorate your cookies.

This recipe worked really well for us until one point, the icing stage.  I've studied art for many years, I've worked on award winning projects, shown my work in galleries all over the world, but I can't for the life of me control a piping bag.  Our snowmen looked pretty sad.  I think many of the people who ate our cookies found the slightly lame snowmen to be childish and cute, I was just frustrated.  If anybody has tips on how to use a piping bag, I'm all ears.

The other thing to note is that this is not an easy recipe.  Most cookie recipes I've done take less than an hour to prepare, these took about 5 with all of the cooling stages.  The dough is also pretty hard to work with, so weak arms don't work in your favour.  The results however were worth the work, and Allison and I bonded a little more going through the process, that's what the holidays are all about.

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This Week In Candy

Christmas is certainly approaching.  We've got all of our decorations up, and we're now just trying to figure out what kind of candy we'll have around the house for this holiday season.  While I'm always a sucker for a candy cane (no pun intended), I do like chocolates too, in fact I like almost every holiday treat.  The two exceptions are figgy pudding and some fruit cakes.  We have lots of fun things planned for Candy Critic over the holidays, so stay tuned.

Not only is this month going to be full of holiday cheer, but every Wednesday we're also featuring some really cool jewelry from our friends at KanDi Jewelery.  They take the great shapes, colours, and designs of the candy world, and turn it into funky cool wearables.

We're also going to be posting a new entry of our dessert club.  For the holidays we've decided to make gingerbread cookies.  Later this week we'll post our recipe, as well as our experiences making this classic Christmas cookie.

This week on Snack Facts, our Instagram feed, we're looking at the history of cocoa.  It's one of the most prevalent ingredients in the candy world, second only to vanilla and sugar.  So check our Instagram feed every day for a new fact, if you don't use Instagram, you can also follow Snack Facts on our Facebook page and Twitter feed as well.

This week's new review was decided by you, the candycritic.org followers.  I asked you guys all week on our social media sites (including Periscope) which flavour of Fla-Vers you wanted me to review.  It was close, but lime chipotle won. So click here to find out what I thought.

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A Cool Christmas Gingerbread Thing

All this month I've been posting all about some crazy and un-orthodox gingerbread house making gadgets.  Today I'm going to bring up another possibly sensitive subject, gingerbread things other than men/women, and houses.  Would Christmas be the same if you didn't have a gingerbread house?  Would the festive season work if there wasn't a large cookie house to destroy?  I would like to argue that yes, yes it would.  In fact this gingerbread train not only looks great, but it also has a coal car in the back.  What's so great about a coal car you may ask?  It's simple, that's a great place to fill up with all kinds of Christmas treats.  This way you not only have a gingerbread creation to enjoy, but you also have an awesome candy bowl that you can eat.

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A Cool Christmas Gingerbread Thing

Over the last few weeks I've been posting various gingerbread house gadgets that help you make the perfect gingerbread house.  Some might argue that cookie cutters that cut the perfect shaped house pieces, or anything else that helps you make the perfect house might be cheating.  Frankly, I've been on the line about that, in some ways I think it's great to have a gadget to help you make a better gingerbread house.  However I understand that some purists might see the harm in not using your hands, and making a few mistakes, so you can learn how to build your very own cookie built architectural dream house.  Today's gadget on the other hand pushes things way too far.  I think if you're going to build a gingerbread house, it's probably cheating to have a cake pan that's chapped exactly like the gingerbread house.  While I can see the fun in using this mold to make a house out of cake or Jello, I think if you plan on using this mold for any kind of cookie like house, you're cheating.

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A Cool Christmas Gingerbread Thing

This seems like something that could be old fashioned, but it might be modern as well.  When I was a kid, and my grandmother used to make a gingerbread house, but she didn't use any kind of cookie cutter, she used a knife and some cookie based architectural skills.  This cookie cutter on the other hand looks like something she would own, but I'm not sure that they had gingerbread house cookie cutters in my grandmother's day.  So I'm asking any cookie historians out there, are gingerbread cutters a new thing, or have they been unearthed in great pioneer settlement archaeological digs?  Was my grandmother a classic baker, or was she just too cheap to buy cutters?

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A Cool Christmas Gingerbread Thing

There are really two ways to look at these gingerbread house molds.  You can see them as cheating, I mean you don't have to cut any gingerbread, or create any textures using icing with these molds.  All you have to do is jam you gingerbread into them, bake, and in no time you'll have the pieces for a detailed and textured gingerbread house.  You also don't have to worry about cutting your pieces perfectly.  How many times have you had to fix a gingerbread house on the fly because you made one wall too short?  So maybe these are the cheaters way, but maybe they're also a door to a really creative candy neighborhood.

Why not make a gingerbread house, then make a jelly house, and next to that a chocolate house.  These silicon molds don't limit you to just one material, you can make a house out of anything you like. At the very least out of something that goes fairly solid.  And why limit yourself to desserts, why not take a little mashed potato, and bake these in the oven till the mashed potato goes hard?  There's really lots of choices for you to make the tastiest neighborhood in your neighborhood

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Gingerbread Is The Theme This Holiday Season

This year I have been inundated with picture, links, and news articles about awesome gingerbread creations.  I thought it would be appropriate then for me to make sure that this year's Christmas review was also gingerbread themed.  When I was a kid I had a love/hate relationship with gingerbread.  I wasn't a huge fan of the ginger flavour, but I loved the copious amounts of crunchy icing found on a gingerbread house.  I also didn't mind the fact that the house was often covered in various candies as well.  If I could have had it my way, I would have preferred a house made of just icing and candy, but that's just not as traditional.

Click here to read our official Christmas candy review.

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Candy News

I don't want to call these gingerbread houses, I'd rather call them gingerbread art.  Here's the first, and here's the second.

Just in case you want to make your own gingerbread art, here's how you can make a ginger D20.

Quick cookie tip, this is particularly good if you bake a lot of Christmas cookies this season.

I'm probably one of the worst food bloggers when it comes to typos, fortunately I'm not the only one.

The secret origin of candy canes.

How well do you know Yankee candle? I can only assume since you're reading this blog about candy that you know your Jelly Belly flavours.

Just when you thought all of the news this week would be happy, and be about Christmas, Mars has to go and shrink their bars, for profit.

If you want to keep up with all of the daily candy news that we come across as it happens, follow us on Twitter.

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This Week In Candy

I'm not sure if it's just the circles I'm in, but it appears that gingerbread houses are really the big thing this holiday season, even my nephew (pictured above) is getting into the spirit.  It's not that gingerbread wasn't a big thing before, but this year it seems like everybody in the world is doing something creative with gingerbread.  I've been posting links to cool gingerbread projects on our Twitter feed as well as our weekly news link roundup.  Also, this years Christmas candy review, yup, gingerbread themed.

As for the Christmas season in our house, it looks like it's going to be a nice quite one. It seems over the last few years I've been away during the Christmas season, but not this year.  That should leave me lots of time to write up a few blog ideas, work on my book projects, and just generally enjoy all the festivities around the house.

Finally, I've been inspired to start a new YouTube series of videos.  I'm hoping that over the Christmas holidays I'll have the chance to work on them and figure out exactly how I want them to work out.  If everything goes as planned, I want to have the first few videos posted in January.  I'm also looking to record a few podcasts over the holidays and I'm hoping that in the new year they'll happen more regularly.

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Candy News

Because it appears that each "Candy News" post leading up to Christmas needs more Gingerbread links:  Here's some Sci-Fi Gingerbread, and here's the world's largest gingerbread house.  Also, if you've ever wondered how much gingerbread it would take to rebuild your own home, here's a calculator to figure it out.

More people are eating chocolate than ever before, particularly the dark stuff.

Chocolate isn't the only classic treat to be trending right now, licorice is apparently pretty hot too.

Did you know how much theaters are over charging for popcorn, you may not want to know.

When North American candy gets imported to foreign countries, you can only hope that awesome variations are coming soon.

Did you know that Portland is now considered  the "nation’s epicenter of artisan chocolate-making"? Maybe there's good reason.

Remember that Nutella bar I talked about last week?  Well apparently it was so popular that they had to shut it down, because everything sold out.

Speaking of Nutella, most people assume that the stuff is Italian, but actually it's a pretty global product.

If you want to keep up with all of the daily candy news that we come across as it happens, follow us on Twitter.

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Candy News

This is your brain... This is your brain on chocolate... See it works so much better.

So what is a candy cane, where did they come from?  Here's all the information you're going to need.

This years trendy DIY sweet treat for the holidays?  Gingerbread.  Not that it wasn't popular before, but these year it seems to be exploding.  Here's some proof, here even more, and even more.

It turns out that the new folks at Hostess are looking to expand into the global market, that means that all you folks in Europe, Asia, and Australia won't have to pay premium prices for Twinkies anymore.

Nutella Bar opens in Chicago, on an unrelated note, anybody out there have a spare room in Chicago that I could move into?

I'm not sure how I feel about the trend to mix alcoholic drinks and sweet treats together, no matter how silly or strange the combination might be.  Sometimes it works naturally, other times...

If you want to keep up with all of the daily candy news that we come across as it happens, follow us on Twitter.

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Candy News

Science is looking to make it possible for you to taste things over the internet.  Some things I've very excited about, others I'm terrified.

Speaking of science, here's an explanation of the science behind one of the greatest things ever, cookies.

Are you wasting your life?  Not sure?  Why not take a look at your time on earth using jelly beans.

So you want to get into the snack food business, you want to be the biggest company in the world.  Well you have to get past PepsiCo. first.

Here's in interesting look at how the cocoa from your chocolate bar is born.

Yet another awesome looking Star Wars themed gingerbread house, tis the season, I guess.

In Europe, you can't have a low fat chocolate, chocolate must have 25% fat to be considered chocolate, and low fat must be below 23%.

Nuts might be the thing to keep you living longer... that and a little happiness.

A restaurant dedicated to the cocoa bean, that means chocolate for appetizer, mains, and dessert.

If you want to keep up with all of the daily candy news that we come across as it happens, follow us on Twitter.

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Candy Art - Ginger Thrones

I've never seen Game of Thrones, but the shows fans are pretty obsessive.

It just makes sense that people would start to develop gingerbread castles.

Click here to see more examples of this ginger castle.

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Christmas Links - Part 2

Are you sick of making plain old gingerbread houses?  Why not make a gingerbread At-At?

The Big Picture has a great holiday collection of photos, including some photographs of wonderful holiday treats and holiday markets that I'm sure smell really good.

After learning that "nog" is a reference to beer, why not try some beer/Christmas cookie pairings.

Saratoga has a really strange holiday tradition, and it involves smashing peppermint pigs.

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Tuesday's Candy Links

Hurricane Sandy ripped through an area of the United States that's really well known for its artisinal candy industry, so how are they doing?

If you're in Chicago, make sure to check out the "Dreaming of Gingerbread" display at the Marriott hotel.

It's a sad day when any candy store suffers from a fire, but honestly I imagine that the smell of a burning candy store would be fantastic.

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Candy Art - Gingerbread Infographic

If you need more reason to eat gingerbread, here's some fun information, in graphic format.

I found this infographic here.

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Monday's Candy Links

Chocolate bars are evolving now that Cadbury is designing bars that can stand upright.

What better way to end off the holiday season than a video of a really creepy, unappetizing, transforming gingerbread house.

I'm not sure if the writer of this article realizes that there are vending machines all over Japan, so making them hotspots for wifi is not a marketing scheme, but good wifi science.

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