Foodbuzz 24x24: Old Fashioned Taffy Pull!

As soon as Thanksgiving is over it always seems like a mad dash to till New Years. It’s always hard to find time to get together with friends in the craziness of the holidays so I thought a small gathering was in order! I was lucky enough to be selected by Foodbuzz to host my taffy pull as one of the November 24x24 events! I had so much fun hosting one back in May that I knew this party would be great as well!

In addition to the taffy pull there was an old fashion soda station set up for guests to make their own sodas.

I made 3 homemade syrups – chocolate, peppermint, and vanilla – to mix into the soda water. Vanilla and peppermint syrup recipes will be shared in future posts.

Homemade Chocolate Syrup

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups water

3 cups sugar

1 1/2 cups Dutch-processed cocoa

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

2 tablespoons light corn syrup

 

Directions:

In a small pot, bring water and sugar to a boil and whisk in cocoa, vanilla, salt, and corn syrup. Whisk until all of the solids have dissolved. Reduce sauce until slightly thickened. Strain and cool to room temperature. Pour into bottles.

 

Syrup recipe from Alton Brown

This chocolate syrup has many uses (besides making chocolate soda recipe below!), you can use it as an ice cream topping or to make chocolate milk. It can also be put into squeeze bottle for drizzling :) And trust me when I say that Hershey’s syrup can’t compete against this stuff – the chocolate flavor is rich and smooth, and definitely worth taking the time to make.

Old Fashioned Chocolate Soda

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons homemade chocolate syrup (recipe above)

Soda water

Ice

Optional toppings:

Whipped cream

Chocolate syrup for drizzling

Cherry

Sprinkles

 

 

Directions:

Pour 2 tablespoons (or more, to taste) of chocolate syrup into a tall glass. Add soda water into the glass until it is ¾  full and stir chocolate syrup with a spoon until dissolved. Fill the remainder of the glass with ice and top with whipped cream, drizzle with chocolate, some sprinkles and top with a cherry. Enjoy with a straw.

Recipe by me

The old fashioned chocolate sodas we really delicious!

While everyone was sipping on their sodas, we got started on the taffy making! Pouring hot sugar is always a dangerous task :)

After letting it cool we started to pull it -

This is where we started to run into problems…we cooked the taffy a little too long, once it started to cool it hardened a bit too much

We tried a few more batches but they didn’t turn out quite right either. Despite our best efforts we didn’t get any actual taffy – however we did manage to make some sugary eggnog and flavored candy :)

Taffy (and candy in general!) is extremely temperamental so after a few tries we gave up and decided to warm up and eat some yummy soup!

At the end of the party, each guest left with a vintage bottle of soda to take home to enjoy.

Even though our taffy endeavor didn’t go exactly as planned, I would definitely like to try it again :) It was a fun afternoon getting to try some taffy making, enjoying some yummy sodas, and chatting some friends!