Susan Heeger - Hand-Crafted Candy Bars: From-Scratch, All-Natural, Gloriously Grown-Up Confections

FROM-SCRATCH, ALL-NATURAL,
GLORIOUSLY GROWN-UP CONFECTIONS

Susie Norris & Susan Heeger
Photographs by Joseph De Leo

We would like to thank the following people, who, in different ways, helped guide and inspire us on the candy path, or walked it with us:

Jane and Jim, Frances, and Jim and Kelly Norris; Jason Epstein; Judy Miller; Helen Epstein and Peter Peter; Marcia, Mike, and Otto Heeger; Laura and Peter Bernhard; John Heeger and Hoang Nguyen; Andrea, Jim, Lily, Rosie, Lenard, and Elaine Steiner; David Draper; Audrey Augun; Gerson Zweifach; Tom Hentoff; Amy Treadwell; Joseph De Leo; Alice Chau; Carrie Purcell; Stuart Courtney; Natacha Leighton; Jackie Rogers; Carole Bloom; Peter Greweling; recipe-tester Christina Chung.

Very special thanks to our agents, Betsy Amster and Angela Rinaldi.

Text copyright 2013 by Susie Norris and Susan Heeger.

Photographs copyright 2013 by Joseph De Leo.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2440-7

The Library of Congress has previously cataloged this title under:

ISBN 978-1-4521-0965-7

Designed by Alice Chau and Lydia Ortiz

Illustrations by Lydia Ortiz

Food styling by Carrie Purcell

Prop styling by Paige Hicks

Chronicle Books LLC

680 Second Street

San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

This book is dedicated to:

Our families: Jacob, Sam, Natalie, and Thomas Epstein, and Rob and Simon Steiner, avid supporters of our candy-making adventures

Our dear friends: Jeremy and Dara Samuelson and Rebecca Farr, who helped us conceive and envision this project and without whom it wouldnt be

and to everyone who shares our candy-bar passion .

They took us sweetly through childhood and beyond; now weve grown up and they can too. We present our passionate plan for making more of a nearly perfect treasure.

What is a candy bar? What shouldand shouldntbe in it? This is where we roll out some history, tracing the path of our favorite sweets, from Aztec gold to Hershey heaven to high-octane, upscale cocoa. Youll find a tool list, too, for the well-equipped candy kitchen.

Inspired by the classics, we take building-block recipes from and combine them in different ways, pairing complementary textures and tastes to craft luxurious, special-occasion bars for today.

We couldnt bear to leave these out, though they dont fit our definition of a bar as an often-layered, usually chocolate-coated confection that takes time to savor rather than tiny treats you can just pop in your mouth. But we feel they are absolutely necessary to the sweet life well-lived, not to mention the pleasures of a movie.

Candy can be good for you, especially if you make it yourself, using premium dark chocolate and loading in the walnuts, dried blueberries, and citrus zest, and lots of flavors-du-jour in the food world (green tea, black sesame, chipotle), which pair beautifully with chocolate. Well give you recipes to prove our point, along with a Mix-and-Match Chart to help you craft your personal version of a dream bar.

Going from candy-lover to candy-maker can be a pretty straightforward transformation if youve got the tools. Its also very satisfying, in the old-fashioned, deep-heart vein of hand-crafting in the kitchen.

While hand-crafted candy bars hardly need elaboration, they will show up even more fetchingly on a plate if you crown them with Dark-Chocolate Flowers or a soupon of Caramel Sauce.

Simple Syrup

Were crazy about candy bars. We grew up with them, swapped them with our friends at school, ate them in movies, sneaked them home past our parents, who worried about our teeth. Even their wrappers delighted us. Cherished icons of our childhoods, these candy bars have stayed with us ever since. Theyve grown a little smaller and mutated into fun sizes for Halloween and dark and crunchy versions that expand our choices at the checkout. Still, theyre what we know, what we remember. Theyre essentially the same.

What makes them great? Their combination of nostalgia and convenience: A candy bar is a small gift you can give yourself any time of dayan intense, concentrated pleasure to keep or share and repeat as often as you please. Its easy to find, cheap to buy, a little nothing with a big payoff.

Just how much that little nothing means hit home for us a few months ago. The two of us, who have a long, shared history with chocolateand in particular, candy barshad dinner with a bunch of friends. The talk turned to food and then to sweets, and suddenly, we were all shouting names of our favorites! The debate got so emotional that we realized we werent alone. Everyone was obsessed! We all had our opinions, and in marketing terms, our dedicated buying habits. Dark chocolate, milk chocolate, almonds, no almonds. Some of us were big on crunch, others on smoothness; some favored many layers, others at most two.

But as we kept on talking, something else became clear: As passionate as we all were, and as hooked on our versions of the ideal barcompletely uniform and predictable every timewe realized we also occasionally wanted more. We faced the fact that as candy bars have stayed the same, we havent. While our mothers thawed frozen peas and swore by The Joy of Cooking , we click on Top Chef , scan food blogs, follow chefs and restaurants, own knife sets, and make jam. Having read Food Rules by Michael Pollan, were uncomfortable with food thats too processed. We like simplebut really good. And were willing to spend timeand a little extra moneymaking it.

All this suddenly led us to the conclusion that candy bars could be different. Fresher, purer. For what they cost in fat and calories, they could be made with top chocolate, fresh nuts, and, please, no high-fructose corn syrup! But for this to happen, we would need to make them ourselves.

Here are a few facts: Mass-produced candy bars require a long shelf life so they can make their way from factories to warehouses to stores to customers around the world. Manufacturers add preservatives to keep the dairy ingredients from spoiling. They also have to design the candy bars for portability, so they stack with tight efficiency into packing crates but dont arrive battered and squashed at the end of their trip. Thats why the wrappers are full of zesty charm and the bars inside are no-frills bricks.

Nevertheless, we keep craving our candy bars, along with other sweets. The United States is one of the worlds leading candy consumers, despite dicey economic times. Today, though consumers are carefully watching their budgets, theyre willing to spend even more for high-end candy. This trend is linked to strong public interest in the health benefits of dark chocolate and a move toward premium and responsibly manufactured (organic, fair-trade) products. Another factor, of course, is superior taste.

Should it really surprise us that a chocoholic used to the scant cocoa content of much commercial candy would find religion in the first bite of an artisan bar made with 72 percent cocoa? It happens every day. It happened to both of us. And it gave us an idea: While were hardly going to give up the sweet, nostalgic candy bars we love, lets also make our own, inspired by the originals but more luxurious!