Buddha’s Hand Candy

Earlier this month I found some buddha’s hand at the farmers markets and impulse bought one because I thought it’d be fun. I’d only bought them once before, and honestly I can’t remember what I did with it, probably just grated it over some food.

I got this great idea of trying to make candied buddha’s hand, and after checking about 3 recipe pages to make sure they were all roughly the same recipe, I gave it a go!

I cut the fruit into cubes and then boiled them until they got soft, and then added a heap of sugar (measuring? Who needs to measure these things!) and then simmered it until the syrup started thickening. One of the pages I read gave a great tip about dropping some of the syrup into ice water and watching it sink - to know when the candy is ready, it should leave some threads as it falls to the bottom. The threads shouldn’t be too thin, and not threading enough is too late. I think I got it close enough! It was threading so I turned the heat off and then the residual heat eventually took the candy to non-threading stage haha, but it didn’t feel too bad.

Isn’t the candy so pretty and shiny?

And then dusted it with caster sugar to help dry it out some more and make it look even more candy-like!

Taste wise these ended up pretty good; the flesh only bits were absolutely delicious and they had such a strong fragrance! The bits that had skin had a slight bitterness to them, but that’s to be expected. It was a total success!

However, I don’t think I’ve used that much sugar in a long time! When I was making it, I was thinking to myself that this was about 6 month’s worth of sugar for me (the recipe recommended 200g sugar to 200mL water to 1 buddha’s hand), and I managed to consume it all in a week? Crazy! But I’m glad I tried it out!