Image by Richard Manship from Pixabay
By Dawn Smith-Pfeifer
It's chewy. It's sugary, and in most cases, you either love it, or well, you don't.
Of course, we're talking about that fall confection, candy corn.
Did you know candy corn has been around since the late 1800s? George Renninger of the Wunderle Candy Company is credited with inventing the candy in 1888. At the time, they called it "Chicken Feed."
After reading several articles about the origin of candy corn, I am fairly confident in saying that it was named "Chicken Feed" because it resembled the corn fed to chickens. Before World War I, corn wasn't considered a staple for human consumption. And since more than half of the population was rural at the time, the name spoke to our agrarian roots.
It wasn't until 1898 that the Goelitz Confectionery Company (now known as Jelly Belly) perfected the process of making the candy and began mass-producing it, calling it candy corn, but still with a nod to the "chicken feed" name.
Csavvj, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
While Jelly Belly still produces the corn-shaped candy, the leader in candy corn production is Brach's Confections, which produces nearly 7 million of the 9 million pieces of candy corn produced each year.
But wait! There's more to the candy corn saga! October 30 is National Candy Corn Day! But if you think you're going to just waltz into a store today or tomorrow and get that bag of premium sugar rush, think again.
This was the lone bag near the checkout at a local business in Bismarck yesterday.
Rabbit hole time! Have you ever seen the photos on the internet of candy corn stacked in ascending circles and marveled at how it looked just like corn on the cob, without the cob? Yeah, me too. Mostly because I never thought about it that way, but also because I was curious if the photo was just "photoshopped," or if this could actually be done?
At On Your Table, we're always up for a Mythbusters-type of challenge, so I tried stacking the candy corn into a corn-on-the-cob shape. To say it was an exercise in frustration and futility was an understatement. First of all, they're slippery. Second, they aren't all uniform. Third, real corn on the cob has a core that all those kernels are attached to. There was no unifier in my sorry little experiment.
That, of course, led down another rabbit hole of internet searches asking what could act as an edible binder to stick these slippery kernels together. We landed on....
Edible cookie dough!
While there are recipes for making your own edible cookie dough, in the interest of time and experimentation, and the fact that raw flour is not necessarily risk-free, I just bought some edible cookie dough at the local grocery store and got to work. I had to choose between cake batter with candy sprinkles or chocolate chip cookie dough. While I'm a HUGE fan of chocolate chip cookie dough...
We interrupt this rabbit hole for a PSA: My mom used to make two batches of said dough. One for baking and one for eating raw. While this was, ahem, 50-plus years ago, we would NOT recommend eating raw cookie dough today. We now resume our regularly scheduled blog post already in progress!
I opted for the cake batter with candy sprinkles, mostly because it would be easier to work with than one with chunks of chocolate, and I need all the help I can get!
First, I shaped the "cob" out by rolling it out to about a 1 1/4 inch diameter.
Starting at one end, I gently inserted the candy corn, going around the "cob" until one layer was done. Then I proceeded to the second layer. The dough started to get a little sticky and tough to work with, so I put it back in the fridge to chill for a bit, then put the dough with the candy corn side at the bottom and worked upward.
It wasn't long before I realized that my cob was longer than the candy corn pieces that were in the bag and unbroken.
So while it was a short cob, it worked wonderfully!
While the cob would probably look better without sprinkles, I would call this little On Your Table test a success. I mean, if I can do it, anyone can!
It could even be a fun project to do with family or friends or could be used as a centerpiece at a Halloween party.
Happy Halloween, ya'll!
Dawn Smith-Pfeifer is the editor for On Your Table.