HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE
The Recorder – November 21, 2018
Local food products make great gifts
Candy canes from Richardson’s Candy Kitchen
Richardson’s Candy Kitchen on Routes 5 and 10 in Deerfield has been a Franklin County fixture since 1954. Chocolates are their bread and butter at holiday time, Kathie Williams informed me when reporter Melina Bourdeau and I stopped by to watch candymaking.
Nevertheless, Kathie and her family still turn out oldfashioned hard candy at holiday time, including handcrafted candy canes. Bourbeau and I watched while Kathie, her husband Brian, and her father Gordon Woodward cooked a sugar solution in an antique pot.
When the candy was just the right temperature, Brian carefully poured the liquid onto a large slab of marble and added peppermint oil. He then pulled the candy — first with scrapers and then with a giant hook —until it turned white.
Kathie cut a chunk off of the candy and began massaging red paste into it so that the candy canes would have their signature red stripes. She stretched the red portion into snakes, which she threaded through Brian’s white candy.
Strips of the striped candy were transferred to an antique candy cutter to become hard candy. Others were shaped around a weight into candy canes.
Richardson’s also makes wintergreen canes and creates a variety of hard-candy flavors for the holidays. http://www.richardsonscandy.com/
For the full Holiday Gift Guide from The Recorder, click here.
Food Network at Richardson’s Candy
The Food Network highlighted Richardson’s Candy Kitchen on Monday, October 11, 2010 at 9 pm to show the artistry of candy making. After visiting the store in person, Alexandra Guarnaschelli of The Best Thing I Ever Ate sent her crew to the Candy Kitchen to film the best of their chocolate treats; dixies became the focus of a full day of filming.
Dixies, a classic chocolate piece commonly called “turtles,” begin with caramel. Richardson’s make their caramel from scratch using local dairy products. The three person food network crew filmed the full process from the caramel being hand-stirred in the copper kettle over an open flame gas stove to funneling the caramel onto the nuts and to finally dipping the dixies into the chocolate.
Click Here to experience our famous dixies for yourself!
Check out this article about our delicious strawberries!