Chocolate Taffy - a catastrophe

Chocolate taffy is basically a tootsie roll. Since it was halloween I thought I'd try and make some candy for the first time. It was a disaster, literally a disaster. Let me tell you what happened. Things started off well. I had all the ingredients in a saucepan coming to a boil using a heat diffuser. (a heat diffuser just makes sure your pan gets even heat. I used a cast iron skillet on the fire and put my saucepan inside of it. Cast iron is good at even heat since it's so thick and sturdy.)

I turned my back on the candy for one second and it boiled over. I quickly turned down the heat but the boil-over added to my clean-up later. Then my thermometer was telling me it was heating very slowly and it took almost an hour for it to come up to temp. Then when I poured it onto a cookie sheet to cool I could smell burning and some was burnt to the bottom of the pan. As I pulled the taffy I realized it was too hard and that I had over cooked it. I was forced to throw it away and then start on the 30 minutes it took to get the residue candy out of the pan.

If your interested in the recipe you can go to foodnetwork.com and look up alton brown's chocolate taffy. I'm so mad at this candy that I'm not even going to bother posting it. I may try it again one day when I have a candy thermometer. I think the thermometer didn't get accurate readings and hopefully I won't overcook it again.