Christmas Candy

I love making Christmas candy every year--it's such a fun tradition for me and really it's the only time of the year we make stuff like that--although I'm not sure why. Just tradition, I guess. Well, I really felt like a dork this year. I have honestly never had candies NOT turn out well. I think I ruined about everything this year. But there were silver linings and teaching moments. Here's the rundown:
1-fudge--turned out perfect. easy. yummy
2-caramels--looked perfect, tasted great when I licked the spoon, but hard as a rock. I ended up sticking the whole 9x9 glass pan in the micowave to get it soft enough to pry from the pan. I put it back on the stove and slowly melted it back down, and added a cup of milk. Stirred it till it was super creamy, tested it in cold water to make sure it wouldn't be hard as a rock, and it was good. When it set up, it was perfect hardness/softness, but way different--here's the silver lining: I've created a new recipe. Instead of being chewy caramel, it was fudgy. It is delicious, but I would call it caramel flavored fudge, not caramels. So, I eventually found out my thermometer was off (I'll tell more about that further down). So, If you want to make delicious caramel fudge, cook your caramels 10 degrees longer than normal, then follow what I did above.
3-Truffles--I lost my cookbook in the mail when we moved, and tried to remember the recipe, so it was more semi-sweet flavor than I like and it was too runny, and I thought the chocolate shell stuff you use for dipping strawberries would be easy to dip the truffle centers in--well, I was wrong. The truffle centers were refrigerated (otherwise they were like syrup at room temperature), so when I dipped them, the chocolate shell set up super quick cuz of the cold, and it was turning big blobs in the bowl into the hard shell, so I kept having to heat it up. My truffles kept springing leaks at room temp. so I had to keep them refrigerated, but the shell stuff is way too hard like that--it only tastes good at room temp. Disappointing.
4-penuche(also called brown sugar fudge--it's a super creamy mildly caramel flavored melt-in-your-mouth fudge.)It's not that hard to make, but I discovered my 2 small mistakes. I forgot to take into consideration of altitude here--way different then sea level florida. like 8 degrees on a candy thermometer different (which means about 15 extra minutes of cooking, which makes a HUGE difference.) Mistake number 2 was skipping a detail in the recipe--I guess I thought I knew the recipe well enough, oops. So after your ingredients come to a boil, you DO NOT stir it--at all!!! Otherwise, it will crystalize into a hard rock. well, you guessed it, I stirred it the entire 20 minutes. Big sugar rock. Dumb mistake. So I made it again. the 2nd and 3rd times I made it, it was crumbly (then I realized the altitude thing.) so, finally batch #4 turned out PERFECT. Sheesh!! What a waste of time and expensive ingredients.
5-Hershey Clouds-These should be the easiest things to make in the world. All you do is melt hershey bars, stir in cool whip, then refrigerate and then roll in nuts or coconut. How do you even mess these up? Well, I somehow missed the tiny detail to cool the chocolate before stirring it in--so it melted the cool whip, which made it not set up very well, so they were a melty mess to roll, and they are way too soft at room temperature.
Anyway, I'm going to do better next year. The ironic thing too, was that I was making this all for a neighborhood party we were hosting, not just for my family, so it really was stressful and infuriating. I'm including pictures of 3 of the batches of penuche--I forgot to take a pic of the first crystal-rock.