Corn Syrup
42 recipes found
Chocolate Easter Egg Nests
Loved by adults and children alike, Easter nest “cakes” are the perfect no-fuss baking activity for the whole family. These couldn’t be simpler: Just stir, portion, chill and fill with as many candy eggs as you can. If you can find golden syrup (a wondrous sweetener from Britain and a product you’ll never regret having in your pantry), you’ll get a more complex sweetness and chew, though corn syrup will work, too.
Pumpkin Pecan Sheet Cake
Can’t decide which pie to bake this holiday? Take dessert in a different direction with this spiced pumpkin cake slathered in brown sugar caramel and showered with toasted pecans. This cake owes its pillowy texture to a lush, mayonnaise-like base made by slowly streaming oil into long-whipped, room-temperature eggs. The addition of corn syrup ensures the cake stays moist for days; there is no substitute for it. To keep the topping gooey, don’t stir it once off the heat. Excessive stirring will cause it to crystalize and set with a brittle texture.
Salted Cashew Brittle
Candy making can be intimidating, but this sweet and salty brittle is actually easy to make, no candy thermometer required. With a few basic ingredients and about 20 minutes, you’ll have a perfect, giftable treat. Sugar is cooked with butter and lots of salt until fragrant and the color turns a deep amber. Then, a little bit of baking soda is stirred in to create air in the candy, making it easier to bite through, while the addition of plenty of vanilla maximizes flavor. Buttery cashews make delicious brittle, as they are soft and yielding in contrast to the deep crunchy caramel. Use roasted and salted nuts for the best taste. This brittle recipe is quite salty as written, so scale back to 1 teaspoon of salt or use unsalted, roasted nuts for a less salty version. To avoid getting splashed by hot sugar, use oven mitts and a long-handled utensil to stir.
Popcorn Balls
A joy to both make and eat, popcorn balls are a chewy and sweet treat prepared with a mix of mini marshmallows, powdered sugar and corn syrup. Dress them up for special occasions with a variety of mix-ins, such as candies, colorful sprinkles, crushed pretzels, crumbled cookies and food coloring. To ensure the popcorn balls stay intact, the popcorn is kept warm in the oven until it’s ready to be mixed with the hot marshmallow cream. You’ll need to shape the popcorn balls fairly quickly, so this becomes a fun activity for the kids to lend a hand.
Scotcheroos
Originally printed on the Rice Krispies box in the 1960s, Scotcheroos are Rice Krispies treats minus the marshmallow but with gobs of peanut butter, chocolate and butterscotch chips. Use either natural, unsweetened peanut butter or the more conventional stuff. Either will work just fine, with the natural version tasting a tad less sweet. For a twist, you could also swap the corn syrup for honey, golden syrup or a mix of both. Bittersweet chocolate, as opposed to semisweet, helps to balance the sweetness. A sprinkling of flaky salt and crushed peanuts aren’t traditional, but they look as good as they taste.
Paul Prudhomme's Sweet Potato Pecan Pie
This recipe came to The Times in 1983 from the renowned Louisiana chef Paul Prudhomme. Like its traditional pecan cousin, this pie is very sweet, so serve it with a little Chantilly cream on top.
Candy Apples
Traditional candy apples are dipped in a vibrant syrup that’s tinted red. This version skips the food coloring, and instead infuses the candy coating with cinnamon and vanilla. If you're worried about your teeth, serve these by slicing them, rather than trying to take a bite, as the candy coating sets to be quite firm. Be sure to start with room temperature apples as cold apples will cause the candy mixture to harden too quickly making it difficult to work with.
Caramel Apples
An easy recipe for making homemade caramel apples, this can be doubled or tripled easily to make more. Once dipped, the apples can be rolled in chopped nuts, candy, or drizzled with chocolate for a little extra flair. Be sure to start with room temperature apples as cold apples will cause the caramel mixture to harden too quickly making it difficult to work with.
Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie
This spin on an icebox pie, with its chocolaty press-in graham cracker crust and airy no-bake peanut butter filling, comes with a sheen of fudgy glaze. A splash of coffee accentuates the dark side of the bittersweet chocolate, and salted peanuts scattered on top add crunch. As fun as a candy bar and as creamy as a cheesecake, this layered dessert looks and feels special but is simple enough for anyone to pull together. And it’s even easier to serve: The whole thing can be refrigerated for up to 3 days.
Salted Caramels
Despite being primarily made of sugar, these soft caramels are wonderfully complex in flavor, as the sugar is cooked to a deep amber before fresh dairy is added and the mixture cooked again. Infusing the cream with coffee is optional, but it lends a pleasant bitterness to the candies.
Nougat With Honey and Pistachios
Nougat is not exactly for the faint of heart: Preparing it involves heating honey and a sugar syrup separately to different temperatures and streaming them into beaten egg whites in rapid succession. Make sure you have all of your ingredients ready before you start cooking, and the reward is a candy unlike any other with a snow-white color, fresh honey flavor and lots of toasted pistachios to temper the sweetness and add crunch.
Chocolate Fudge
Fudge can be fickle, easily becoming grainy and hard if it’s beaten too much or if the sugar mixture crystallizes, the result of undissolved sugar crystals. Try to make fudge in a cool environment that is not humid, and, if the final texture isn’t quite what you desire, know that cooking the fudge at a temperature that’s a few degrees lower the next time will result in a softer fudge, while a few degrees higher will make it firmer. Fudge also dries out easily, so make sure it’s well wrapped.
Sweet-and-Salty Party Mix
This joyful, crunchy snack to share with friends (and enjoy with cocktails) relies on corn syrup, sugar and soy sauce for a balance of sweet and savory. The glaze in this recipe is a riff on the sweet-and-salty coating used in cereal-seaweed snack mixes found in Hawaii that bakes into an irresistible, super-crisp shell. A bit of Worcestershire sauce lend some tang, and cayenne adds a surprising touch of heat. Use the mix-in amounts as a guide, and feel free to use whatever cereals, crackers and nuts speak to you.
Pecan Sandie Pie
All the richness of pecans, buttery and crisp in the cookie crust, candied in the gooey filling, run through this pie. In this take on a Thanksgiving classic, standard pie dough is swapped for pecan sandie dough. It’s not only tastier with its nuttiness, it also doesn’t require rolling. You can simply pat it into the pan and into a round for the top. For a toastier flavor and a little more crunch, bake the pecans first in a 350-degree oven until fragrant and a shade darker.
Sesame Candy
This sesame candy is a traditional Chinese candy that is available year-round but also eaten during the Lunar New Year celebrations. This recipe produces a slightly chewy candy, with some crunch on the sides. It’s a relatively easy candy to make, but you’ll want to follow the directions closely when preparing the syrup. The addition of water helps to evenly dissolve the sugar as the syrup cooks. Do not stir the sugar as it cooks or it will crystallize, forming small clumps instead of a smooth syrup. It can be hard to see a visual cue when toasting black sesame seeds. A subtle indication that they are toasted is that they feel a bit hollow compared to before they are toasted — or you can simply trust their scent: They’ll smell fragrant and toasted.
Vegan Ice Cream
The combination of high-fat hemp and coconut milks gives this nondairy ice cream base an ultra-creamy texture, with a taste mild enough not to obscure any flavorings. The liquid sugar (corn syrup or agave syrup) along with a little vodka help to keep ice crystals from forming, giving the smoothest texture. If you can't find hemp milk, substitute cashew milk. It has a similar fat content, though the flavor is slightly less neutral. Nondairy ice cream is best eaten within a week of freezing.
Chocolate Pecan Pie
Here is a pie that might make Thanksgiving purists shake their heads. Chocolate and pecan? But bear with us. The bittersweet chocolate adds depth to what is traditionally an achingly sweet pie, and the bourbon gives it a grownup finish. For more delicious pie recipes, check out our collection of Thanksgiving pies.
Caramel Apple Pie
Here, a carnival caramel apple is stacked onto a buttery crust: The snap of fresh apple slices gives way to soft salted caramel and a melt-in-your-mouth cookie base. It’s put together as a pie with layers like a bar cookie for a look that’s impressive but simple to pull off. The dough doesn’t require rolling. Instead, you press crumbs into a pie plate and end up with a cross between sturdy shortbread and sandy French sablés. A candy thermometer takes the guesswork out of caramel, but you don’t need one to make the stretchy filling. For a tangy contrast to the filling’s sweetness, use tart green apples, but feel free to swap them for other varieties you like.
Pecan Pie Sandwich Cookies
These portable takes on pie are for nut lovers. The rich crunch of toasted pecans runs through them, from the brown sugar shortbread to the tender praline center. Ground nuts make the cookies both crumbly and crisp. More pecans are packed into the filling, which combines a deep sweetness with the texture of a soft caramel. A candy thermometer helps ensure the filling doesn’t end up saucy or chewy; it runs like lava during assembly, then sets as it cools. You can skip the filling for a batch of buttery cookies, or make it on its own to use as an ice cream topping. The assembled cookies keep at room temperature in an airtight container for up to five days.
Classic Chocolate Éclairs
Master pâte à choux (choux pastry dough) and a world of dreamy, airy desserts opens up to you: éclairs, croquembouches, profiteroles, gougères and even churros. Choux pastry dough is unique in that it is typically prepared in a saucepan over heat, which might sound intimidating, but it is much more approachable than you might think. If you don’t have a pastry bag, you can use a resealable plastic bag to pipe these éclairs — or turn them into cream puffs by simply dropping the dough in 2-tablespoon scoops about 3 inches apart onto a baking sheet. The pastry starts to soften as soon as the éclair is filled with custard, so indulge immediately. It won’t be difficult. Save any leftover chocolate glaze in the refrigerator. Reheated, it makes perfect hot fudge sauce.
Rye Pecan Pie
To streamline operations in the pastry kitchen at Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the restaurant’s pastry chef, Avery Wittkamp, devised an enormous solution, which can be easily adopted by home cooks. She bakes this pie in a 10-inch springform pan, using a thicker, stretchable crust that can line the deep sides; it stays in place even when the pie is unmolded. Impressively, the tall bark-brown crust rises over a filling as wide, majestic and mahogany-brown as a redwood tree. She bakes the pie longer than usual to fully brown the crust, and gives it a higher crust-to-filling ratio than a traditional pie. She also deconstructs the traditional pecan pie filling into three strata: the custard, the chopped nuts and the whole nuts, each one delicious and distinct. (Don't be intimidated by homemade crust. Our pie crust guide will tell you everything you need to know.)
Vanilla Marshmallows
Homemade marshmallows should have their own dreamy name, something that makes it clear that they’re different from the supermarket stuff. When you make this recipe by Christine Moore of Little Flower Candy Co., you get puffs that are soft, tender, languidly stretchy and delicately sweet, and a lesson in the transformative power of heat and air. To make these, you beat together roiling-hot sugar syrup and gelatin, and watch as the mixture goes from murky to opaque, from beige to white, from thin to billowing. For this magic to happen, it takes almost 15 minutes, plus a very large bowl and a sturdy mixer. (I use a 5-quart stand mixer.) You need no special skills, just patience — you have to wait a few hours for the whipped mixture to dry — but you’ll be rewarded with singular sweets good for toasting, s’mores, snacking and wrapping up as gifts.
Walnut Pie With Molasses and Orange
This pie is fudgy, nutty, salty-sweet and spiked with citrus. It’s a meeting of sorts, between arguably Britain and America’s greatest desserts: the treacle tart and pecan pie. Cut corners by grating the crust instead of rolling it out, but don’t skip making your own bread crumbs and roasted walnuts; the texture and flavor rely on the freshness of both. Once you’ve prebaked the crust to biscuit brown, err on the side of undercooking the molasses-custard filling: It’ll firm up when cooled and stay gooey for days.
Philadelphia-Style Ice Cream Base
Made without eggs, this ice cream is much less rich than those made with a custard base. The lack of eggs also allows the flavorings to shine through, making it a light in texture yet intense in taste. Using a combination of granulated sugar and liquid sugar (corn syrup, honey or agave syrup) helps keep the texture smooth and silky.