Sisters are great, I should know — I have 3 of them. However, do you have a sister who used her little pink sewing machine to stitch outfits for your dolls? Or taught herself how to make stick jaw candy from a cookbook because you simply couldn’t stop talking about how delicious the jewel-like candies in the said cookbook looked? Do you have a sister who shared her rock collection with you? Me neither. Hehe. But other than not sharing her rock collection, which I eventually stole from her anyway, the rest is 100% true of my sister Sadi. I don’t know anyone who is as incredibly, intensely creative as her. She has this razor sharp focus, that sometimes, I am the lucky benefactor of, and then, I know something incredibly fun is about to happen. This candy that she first started making for me when she was in college, is one of those things. It’s not an easy recipe to master — it takes a lot of practice to be able to handle molten, hot sugar with your bare hands. But she kept at it, and eventually we had a resident candy-maker in the house, which was a lot of fun, as you can imagine. Here’s a more grown-up flavoured version of the ones she used to make. It uses sulaimani tea (a spiced lime tea), as the base flavour of the candy.
Recipe: Sulaimani Tea-Flavoured Stick Jaw
Ingredients
For the sulaimani tea
1/4 cup water
1 tsp tea powder
A pinch of saffron
1 pod green cardamom
Squeeze of lime
For the candy
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup sulaimani tea
1 tbsp liquid glucose
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
Method
Bring the water to a boil in a saucepan. Add the tea, and the spices. Let it boil for a minute and remove from flame. Add the lime juice, strain the tea and set aside.
To make the candy, mix all ingredients and stir over low flame till sugar dissolves.
Without stirring, bring to a boil.
Ensure there are no sugar crystals at the side of the pan using a brush.
Once the brittle stage has been reached, remove from fire and pour onto a granite surface, or a silplat.
When sufficiently cool, start pulling the candy into a rope, folding it over itself, repeating the process until it changes colour and starts to look more opaque.
Fold the Twist into a and cut into bite-sized pieces.
Images by Atul Pinheiro.