Post #329274 by The Gnomon on Fri, Aug 31, 2007 7:56 AM

Well, if you want to try it, here's a fancy swizzle stick I invented a few years back. I call it the Pickless Drink Pick Rock Candy Swizzle Stick:

You can get spare lids for these canning jars. Poke/drill holes in a spare lid spaced about ½" apart. Mine are aligned in the form of a hexagon, so there are 19 holes. You want to make the holes just a little larger than the diameter of the bamboo sticks. I use bamboo skewers, which are readily available in all the grocery stores. They are pointed on one end and flat on the other.

The trick to this particular swizzle stick is that you submerse the flat end and leave the pointed end sticking up in the air. You'll need a small piece of corrugted board (ideally—'cause it holds better), but you could also use a piece of chip board (aka, cardboard). You put that on top of the lid, taping it to the lid around the edges, to hold the sticks in place and keep them from sliding out of the lid or otherwise moving around. Push the sticks into the holes in the lid from the inside/underside—through the lid and into the corrugated board.

You position the sticks in the lid so that they are all vertical and do not touch each other. The sticks should be protruding enough beneath the lid for about two inches of the stick to be submersed in the rock candy syrup when you put the lid on the jar. This can be a little tricky as the sticks can move around a little as you screw the lid on the jar. You want to make sure you don't wobble them around so much that the corrugated board loses its grip on any sticks.

The idea is for the sticks to remain as still as possible submersed in the rock candy syrup until enough rock candy has formed on them to suit you. When the diameter of the rock candy around the stick reaches about ¼" it's a good time to take them out. There are two things you can do to speed up the formation.

First is to make sure that the rock candy syrup is as unstable as you can possibly make it. Under those conditions, the sugar in the syrup will be aching to jump out of the solution and anything that sits around in the syrup is its first target.

Second is to dip the sticks into the syrup for a brief moment then let them dry. When they're dry, put them back into the syrup and let it sit until they're done. By doing this, the initial dip evaporates and causes a very thin layer of rock candy to form on the sticks right away. Rock candy forms faster on existing rock candy. It's a crystal and that's what crystals do. By forcing this layer to form quickly, you don't have to wait for sugar molecules to drift around in the solution and "hunt" for a place to form. You're telling them where the party is right off the bat.

When you are ready to dry the sticks, whether in making the initial base layer or at the end when they're done, just screw the cap with the sticks onto an empty jar. Once they're dry, you'll have a bunch of bamboo sticks with a point on one end and a rock candy crystal on the other.

The beauty of this is that you can now skewer pinapple chunks and other fruit down over the point to where it meets the rock candy crystal. Then you snip off the point with something. I use a pair of needle nose pliers that has a wirecutter. Do something decorative to the snipped off end and you have yourself an amazing pickless drink pick rock candy swizzle stick.

I used to use sealing wax (the kind used to put a seal on letters) as one treatment to the tip. A glob of sealing wax hardens and cools fast, plus it obscures the fact that the fruit was skewered from that end, so it's a momentary visual puzzle. The mind wants to think that the fruit was skewered from the end sitting down in the drink, but that's not possible onnacounta there's a rock candy crystal in the way. :) If you decide to use sealing wax, mash the snipped tip with pliers so that it fans out a little and the sealing wax doesn't accidentally come off.

You can eat the fruit off the stick or wait until the rock candy dissolves enough to slide the fruit off the stick.

[ Edited by: The Gnomon 2007-08-31 09:09 ]