Growing up, our dad owned a few candy stores on the Gulf Coast of Florida. We always had the best candy to give out at Halloween, in exchange for which Rebecca spent one day a year waddling around the Brandon TownCenter Mall in an inflatable JellyBelly jelly bean suit. Why? Because dads are all about embarrassing their daughters. Also because she was the only person short enough to fit inside the costume.

Rebecca as a Jelly Belly; a young & beardless Max

What’s this have to do with our homemade candy? A lot, actually. There are only so many jawbreakers, gummy peaches, and chocolate-covered Pop Rocks we could eat before we A) swore off candy completely, and then, B) decided to take matters into our own hands, albeit 10 years later.

Rebecca had a little experience with candy going in: basics like sea salt caramels, decorative sugar webbing, chocolate-coated-this-and-that. Neither of us had made a brittle before, though. And candy apples? We’d probably had one bite, in our entire lives, combined. Our mom - the wife of the guy who called himself “The Candy Man” (no, dad, that is not at all creepy) - always told us candy apples were too sugary. Unlike Sour Patch Kids and those chocolate-covered Pop Rocks.

(This might be a good place to mention that Rebecca went through a cavity phase when she was 12. But she never had a candy apple, so there’s that!)

The pumpkin seed brittle came out so astonishingly well - if you could apply the word succulent to a piece of candy, this would definitely be the time and place. Next time, we’re going to take another cue from Jacques Torres and add some chopped, dried cranberries to the brittle for a tart kick.

And on the other hand, there were the candy apples. Those poor, poor, very gross candy apples.

We got a lot of fantastic suggestions from you guys about why the caramel failed to stick to the apples:

• Make sure to rinse apples thoroughly in warm water, especially if they’re store-bought;
• Don’t cover the apples until the caramel has completely cooled and hardened;
• Refrigerate the candy apples overnight to ensure the caramel will stick;
• Try rolling the apples in something ‘abrasive’, like granulated sugar first, to create a surface for the caramel to stick to and to ‘force’ re-crystalization

But in the end, based on some comments on the recipe we found on Epicurious.com, we’re thinking it was just a bad recipe. Which we hate to say, considering it came from Gourmet Magazine, and we wanted to make it in tribute to their demise. We both feel pretty awful that the apples didn’t work out in the end, but that’s just a fact of the kitchen: not everything turns out as you expected all of the time. But that’s part of what makes cooking so much fun, right?