Candy Melt pops-- a review

I am not a super candy melts person. I can barely get single colored candies made.
For an even for my kid's derby team I made a slew of candy mustaches.
I've made them before, but this time I took notes, and learned lessons.

What I was doing:
I attempted to make purple, pink, green, and chocolate mustaches over the course of three days.

Using a pyrex measuring cup I melted the purple in the microwave. The candy did not melt, I put it back in, I burned the bejeezez out of the candies.

I switched to the double boiler method, still using the pyrex cup (I mean its pyrex for a reason). This worked ok, but the purple candies just would not work. I thought maybe I didn't clean out the cup and there was still some of the burned candy in there. I managed to make 1 tray of the mustaches (3 large mustaches in a tray I used this one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0057YM9EO) out of the purple, they were horrible. The candy was full of bubbles, and they crumbled coming out of the mold.

I next tried it with the pink.
The pink melted mostly, even stirring it up, it just did not melt into s nice smooth pourable consistency.
I managed to glob the candy into the molds.
It took about 1 cup worth of melts for 1 tray of pops.
Since the candy did not melt smoothly it did not easily transfer into the molds, and I wasted a lot of candy. I got 11 pops from 1 bag.

The pink did melt enough to smooth out in the molds once I gently dropped the tray on the counter a few times to  get the bubbles out.


I globbed some extra candy onto the sticks and they set nicely.

I did find that freezing the trays made it easier to remove the pops.















The next day I moved on to chocolate. WOW what a difference. The chocolate actually melted into a nice smooth pourable consistency. I was able to make nice smooth pops, with out a whole lot of candy around the edges to chip off.

I made 25 pops out of 2 backs of chocolate. Almost no waste, much to the chagrin of my kids who enjoyed "cleaning" out the bowls and spoons when I was done with the pink.






On the last day I started working with the green. It was terrible. The consistency was like working with the purple. I think there are some colors that just do not work well. Purple and green are on that list for me.

Lessons learned:

lesson 1: do not microwave this stuff, it will burn, it will be useless and smell bad once its burned

lesson 2: some colors actually do work better than others. Any of the ones that are actually chocolate melt nice and smoothly. Unfortunately they are also über easy to melt and with melt in your warm car, turning into piles of goo, most likely not on the stick.

lesson 3: it takes about 1 cup of melts for 1 tray of 3 large pops

lesson 4: lightly drop the tray on the counter to knock out bubbles BEFORE you at the pop sticks. The sticks jump out otherwise