Homemade Lemon Gumdrops

For those of you that will say "this has a lot of sugar in it", yes this does, this is candy.
I am not recommending that you eat this for dinner for a week. It has the same amount of sugar as the gumdrops you would buy at a store.

I'm sure you could try to put these in silicone molds to form shapes (if you don't like the cube shape), the trick would be finding small enough ones. These is very sweet and needs to be in small pieces.

Recipe:

1 cup sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
3/4 cup water
1 package (1 3/4 oz) powdered fruit pectin (I used 4.5 tablespoons).
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons of flavoured extract (lemon, orange, cherry, peppermint etc)
1 teaspoon of citrus peel (for orange or lemon gumdrops)
Food colour (optional)
Additional granulated sugar for rolling gumdrops in after completion.

Line a 9x5" loaf pan with aluminum foil and grease the foil with butter or cooking spray.
In a large saucepan combine the corn syrup and 1 cup sugar and heat mixture on med-high, stirring constantly until it boils.
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**note *** The original recipe calls for spraying the saucepan with cooking spray prior to adding the ingredients, it did this, but I found that it didn't make much of a difference in clean up. The sugar stuck to the sides anyway

Once boiling stir only occasionally.
Continue to boil about 9 minutes until the mixture reaches 280F (soft crack stage).
Once it has reached that temperature, take it off the heat.

While the sugar/ corn syrup is boiling you can prepare the following:
In a medium saucepan combine the water, pectin and baking soda (it will foam up a bit). Cook and stir over high heat until mixture boils (about 2 minutes, it won't take long).
I say cook it for two minutes in the video, but it takes two minutes to come to a boil, once it is at a boil, turn the heat off.

Carefully pour the corn syrup mixture in a thin stream into the pectin mixture, stirring constantly. Cook and stir one minute longer over medium high heat.

Remove from heat, add food colour, extract and citrus peel (if using it) and stir.
Pour into prepared loaf pan and let stand until firm.
Cut into squares and roll in additional sugar if desired.
I kept these in a container at room temperature.

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