Syrup Candy

After the plum syrup turned out so well I thought I would try apple/pear syrup. I made a huge batch of jelly and after cleaning up, I started the syrup. I didn't have quite enough of the apple/pear juice so I added about a cup of plain pear juice. I followed the plum syrup recipe and boiled everything for 15 minutes. I knew something was up when I only filled 2.5 pints because doubling the recipe should have given me 4 pints. I double-checked the measuring cup I used... yes 4 cups... oh well, time to process. Fifteen minutes later the stock pot I had used was pretty much cooled. Things were hard, I'm talking so hard I thought "I'm going to need a jackhammer to get this clean!" Everything was more like a hard candy than syrup. After processing the jars I let them cool and oh boy! Things were not moving, this stuff was set so much in the jar that I contemplated throwing jars and all out! But I had just used 6 cups of sugar and I did not want that to go to waste! What's one to do? The first thing was to try to get it out of the jars, short of actually using a jackhammer, I thought I could reboil the jars for about 5 minutes, nope that didn't work, the stuff wouldn't budge. Time to turn up the heat! I reboiled for 25 minutes, bent a metal spoon trying to get the stuff out... grabbed a wooden spoon and finally was able to work most of the jars empty. So now this stuff is sitting in a pot, setting up... fast. I heated it up and things started to melt. But what was I going to do with it? Lollipops! All I had were popsicle sticks so I made a few... I didn't really like how they were turning out. I ended up dumping the whole works on a piece of tinfoil sprayed with Pam and hoped for the best. This morning I broke it into pieces and discovered I had made glass candy. And it's pretty good :)

The "lollipops" didn't turn out so great, and probably would have looked better if I had sticks and molds.

So what did I do wrong? Too much/little pectin in the juice? Too hard/long boiling? Your guess is as good as mine but at least the sugar didn't go to waste! :) I probably couldn't do it again, even on purpose, if I tried! Oh, by the way, the jelly set perfectly :)