My family has a tradition of making multiple rum cakes at Christmas time and giving them out as gifts. The smell of rum cakes is synonymous with Christmas in my mind, and today my mom and I have been cranking out rum cakes left and right. It's been a while since I've made one, so I'm a little out of practice. The glaze on the cakes involves a stick of butter, a cup of sugar, and careful boiling of the mixture for about 5 minutes before you add the rum and spoon it over the cake. Today, I hit 4:30 of careful watching the first batch of glaze and then was distracted by a munchkin. Lo and behold when I looked back 15 seconds later, my nice butter yellow boiling mixture had gone brown, and the smell of burned sugar permeated the kitchen. Damn. On the plus side, I hadn't yet poured in the rum...
My mom, much more knowledgeable than I am in the kitchen, said it had turned into a hard candy mixture and might still be good. Huh. So I found a shallow tray and poured out the boiling hot, now-brownish mixture so it could cool into a sheet, and threw the pot into the sink to wash so I could take my mulligan on the glaze. One thing I somehow missed is that, if the mixture in the tray was hardening as it cooled, perhaps pouring cold water in my cooking pot wasn't the brightest idea. That stuff set up hard as a freakin' rock! So I poured more water into the cooking pan, boiled the water to loosen up the rock-hard crap in the pan, washed it, and finally started another batch of glaze. This time I managed to get the glaze right.
I tried the "hard candy" a little while ago, and I'll be darned - it was actually pretty tasty. Just what we all need, a little more candy at Christmas time. Joy.
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