The Crock Pot Candy Dish

About author / Sarah Christine Bolton

Coffee addict; professional food writer; food fusion. Her slow cooker recipes go above and beyond your normal crockpot fare.

During that lazy week in between Christmas and New Year’s, my husband, sister, and I went to the zoo. My husband kept lamenting that he couldn’t throw Skittles into the lion cage; I had to keep steering him away from the live animals. He was all about cohabitation between cheetahs and gazelles.

“I want to see some live-action, Discovery channel stuff,” he said. I pulled him away, praying that no one who cared about animal rights was within earshot. I also reminded myself to never, ever bring Skittles with us to the zoo.

I’ve never been a huge candy fan. I do like peanut M&Ms occasionally or a bar of dark chocolate. But otherwise, I’d rather snack on a big bowl of popcorn than jelly beans. I did try to make divinity once, from a recipe in my mom’s old Betty Crocker cookbook. It turned out to be more disaster than divine. At that point, I decided to leave candy making to the experts. Besides, no one even knew what divinity was, so I figured that should have scared me away to begin with.

I think part of my lack of candy cravings comes directly from my childhood. To my mom, candy equaled a honey stick or a piece of bubble gum. Making gingerbread houses at Christmas was the only time she would let us buy large amounts of candy. We snuck as many bites as possible during the creation of the house. And then mysteriously, pieces of the house would start to disappear. I personally preferred the white chocolate covered pretzels that made the railing of the balcony. Those were fairly conspicuous so I also went for the tiny white chocolate chips with colorful sprinkles.

I also sometimes liked to pop a Lifesaver in my mouth. I was even more intrigued by the candy when a friend of mine told me the story of how Lifesavers got their name. It went something like this: “So, this guy was walking down the street in a bad part of town, and he dropped his candy on the ground. As he was reaching down to pick it up, a drive-by shooting happened, but they missed him, because he was bending over.” I believed her story for years, until I learned that Lifesavers were invented in 1912 (most likely before the term “drive-by” was coined) and that they were named for their ring shape (like the inner tubes you see hanging beside the swimming pool that you would throw to a drowning person).

In college, I had a friend--not the same friend, thankfully--who hailed from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Yep, there is a town named after the famous milk chocolate bar that Milton S. Hershey first introduced in 1900. Or maybe it’s vice versa. Anyway, my friend’s dad worked at the Hershey plant and regularly brought fresh chocolate home. And my friend would sometimes bring it back to school with her. I was always willing to take a fresh dark chocolate bar out of her freezer, when she offered it.

For Christmas, my mother-in-law gave me a miniature crockpot for one of my gifts. The more I looked at it, the more I wondered what the heck I could make in it. And then it hit me. Candy.

The foundation of most candies is, you guessed it, sugar. Whether the sugar becomes hard or soft depends on the temperature. The hotter the sugar, the harder the candy. I’m not sure how that translates into using a crockpot, but I’m sure it would involve higher math to figure that out and…well, as you can see, I’m not posting online algebra equations.

Serves/Makes: 30

• 8 bars (1.45 ounce size) dark chocolate
• 1 cup honey roasted peanuts
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 cup crushed animal cracker cookies