3-Ingredient Home Made Candy

Looking for a quick personal gift? These home made candies take less than 15 minutes to make and taste delicious. Anyone can make home made chocolates using this simple recipe. Moreover, you can use this recipe to have a large group make candy together. I've taught candy making to groups of moms, teenagers and kids and everyone had a great time and felt successful and had fun.

Easy Mix-Ins Candy

Ingredients:

1. Chocolate coating, chocolate chips or candy chocolate (any color or flavor)

2. Mix-Ins: see list below

3. Decorations: sprinkles, M&Ms, contrasting chocolate or other suggestions below.

Making Easy Mix-In Candy is simple. You melt the chocolate (two squares of chocolate coating makes about 12 -16 candies, depending on your mix-ins), stir in the mix-ins and put the candy in mounds on foil or in candy cups. Decorate and then stick in the freezer for a few minutes. In about ten minutes, you have candy ready to eat, serve at a party or package as a gift.

Mix-in ideas:

1.Rocky Road—nuts and mini marshmallows

2. Oreo Cookies (or other sandwich cookies)—crushed lightly with rolling pin

3. Nuts (walnuts, pecans, almonds or hazelnuts all work well)

4. Nuts and raisins or other dried fruit

5. Coconut (with or without nuts)

6. Toffee bits (buy these near the chocolate chips)

7. Peppermint candies crushed in blender (usually use white chocolate for this and pour out on foil.If not pink enough, you can add a drop of red food coloring.Freeze until firm and then break up bar into pieces. (Optional: for a two-colored chocolate, while still warm, you can pour over melted dark chocolate),

8. Marshmallows.

9. Caramel bits

10. Butterscotch or peanut butter chips (let the coating cool a bit and don't mix too much. Or you can put these in the bottom of a candy cup and pour the melted chocolate on top.

11. Turtles: Put a couple of pecans on the bottom of a candy cup and put 1/2 of a caramel square on top (flatten it a bit), then pour on chocolate.

Giving Your Candy as a Gift

One idea for packaging is to put these in a jar. See my hub Candy Jar for instructions.

You can also put these candies in any sort tin, a plate or plastic container. To package them nicely, put the finished candies into paper candy cups and place on a plate or in a decorative tin.

:Candy Making Tips: You can use any type of chocolate for making this candy. Candy coating melts the easies, but doesn't taste as good. Often, I'll combine candy coating with chocolate chips for a better taste but easy melting.The better the quality of the chocolate the better the candy tastes; however, candy coating melts and sets up the easiest. My favorite chocolate for tastes is Guittard or Ghirardelli semi-sweet or milk chocolate chips.Sometimes the cheaper chips won’t firm up as well, but if you add a little candy coating to the mix, it can help.

When I'm making a lot of candy for gifts or for teaching people how to make candy, I will melt a whole pound of chocolate. Usually, I melt 1 pound for one minute—but be careful since it is easy to burn the chocolate.Test your microwave by using 20-30 sec.at a time.Stir before melting more.You want the chocolate to be smooth, but just barely melted.

Caution: It is best not to wait too long to give your candies as gifts. A few days is fine, but a week can make your candy not taste as good.Sometimes temperature changes can make white streaks on chocolate.This does not make the chocolate “go bad” but it doesn't look very good.You can re-melt this chocolate and the white streaks usually disappear. If your chocolate has not melted well and seems hard rather than smooth, you can sometimes rescue it by putting in a little milk or cream. Depending on how much you use, this may make the chocolate too liquid to set up for candy, but it can still be a great chocolate sauce for dipping or on ice cream. Just add butter and milk or cream until it is the consistency you want.