Making Clear Toy Candy that Eventually Led Me to Having a Pizza Stand at Root's Market

Since it is near Christmas, this post isn’t about pizza, but of Clear Toy Candy my husband and I used to make.  We made Clear Toy Candy for many years.  We made wholesale orders for people in New Jersey and other places.  It kept my husband and I really busy before Christmas, because Clear Toy Candy is a tradition around our area.  A lot of our Clear Toy Candy Molds were over 100 years old.  I cherished them, because it took many years and much searching to find the molds.  I was always anxious to add new molds each year to our collection.  When I sold the Caramel Popcorn Business, I saved over half of the molds to use or just because I couldn’t sell them because they held so many memories.  I made Clear Toy Candy before Christmas last year.
These are pictures from when I made the Clear Toy Candy.

My friend Nancy Fasolt, and I talked about Clear Toy Candy many times and she even lent me molds to use around Christmas.  She even wrote a book about Clear Toy Candy that is now for sale.  This is Nancy’s website and where her book is listed about Clear Toy Candy.
http://cleartoycandymoulds.com/index.html

If you have lived in Lancaster County for any length of time, you have tasted a clear toy candy or two or three.  Fasolt dates the candies to medieval Persia. Later they became popular in Germany. Barley sugar candy became more popular in the British Isles.

The traditional colors used for clear toys in the United States are yellow, red and green. Red and green, obviously, are Christmas colors. Yellow is the natural color of the syrup.

Fasolt features several manufacturers of clear toys, including the Regennas family of Lititz. She also describes clear toy traditions, including the Pennsylvania Dutch practice of giving the candy and other food to children on Christmas Eve. Fasolt has been featured on NBC's "Today Show,'' which is how she got to know Willard Scott, who blurbs on the back cover of her book: "Nancy is the Rembrandt of creative candies and that is shown through this historical cookbook. Just like Nancy, the recipes are sweet, creative and the best!''

Nancy is going to be making Clear Toy Candy and signing her book at Hershey, Pa.  This is the website about that.  http://www.hersheystory.org/lib/ads/files/1289842013-Chriskindlmarkt%20web%20page.pdf

I remember how hard my husband I worked making clear toy candy.  We worked many days before Christmas making clear toy candy, until early in the morning.  It was always nice to hear customers say how they remember clear toy candy from years ago, and they also wanted to continue the tradition of sharing with their children the story behind clear toy candy.  It is nice that people still want to share traditions from years ago.  We also sold clear toy candy wholesale to Meisse's candy in Lancaster, Pa.  I remember taking all those boxes of clear toy candy in for them to then retail.  We also made many other kinds of candy and another favorite customers used to buy was peanut brittle, cashew brittle and black walnut brittle.  We also dabbled in old fashioned butterscotch candy and others.

Since this post isn’t about pizza, I thought I would just include this post because while selling many of these clear toy candies at Root’s Market, this is how I eventually got into the Pizza Stand I now have at Root’s Market.

Norma