Polkagrisar

A weird word, for anyone non-Swedish-speaking. But for swedes like myself, a very delicious word. It is a type of candy, commonly made in the city of Gränna in Sweden. They are hard small bits of candy, or long sticks of candy. Extremely sugar-y, and therefore brilliant, white candy with peppermint flavour and red stripes.

We gave it a serious shot today, making those little buggers. It said in the book that they were difficult to make. We were like - "for whimps and pussys maybe!". Until...

The first batch tasted delicious, just like polkagrisar should. But looked like this...

Not really like they should. So we thought - "it was our first time, now we know what we need to improve and do better and quicker". The critical thing is when the sugar suddenly goes rock solid - then you should already be finished rolling and cutting them. This we were not the first time, but the second time, we did it perfect!

So we got very cocky, like -"well how difficult was this, höhöhö, now we can just improve them a little bit, so they get more white, but that's a piece of cake". The third batch, however, looked like this...

Do note my weird face. And if you can't see it, the polka-dough just got all strange and went rock hard and we couldn't shape it into candies. Also, do note the fashionate gloves we wear. We found a recipe on the internet (while running into problems in the process of making the candy), where it said "use rubber gloves". Which was a great tip, since 150 degrees C warm sugar, is pretty warm. But we hadn't any. Oh, well dad offered us one pair which he had used to clean the sewer or something, we refrained. So instead we fasioned something based on our own winter gloves, 5L-plastic bags, and lots of sticky-tape.

We were stubborn, and went for the fourth, final batch, completely green. It turned out really good, tasty, but nowhere near polkagris-looking. But who cares! It was fun. And only a bit annoying. And I only got one small blister.