Great flames leapt from the sides of a copper kettle. Nineteenth-century contraptions turned and spun, making clunka-clunka sounds. Cinnamon punched the air, then peppermint, then cherry.
And Dave Camp, master candymaker at Hammond’s Candies in Denver, turned a pile of hot, elastic sweet stuff into nickel-sized hard candies with an image of Santa in the center.
People have been making sugary treats at Hammond’s since 1920, and workers still fill the factory, pouring vats of molten caramel onto metal tables, shaping candy canes and dipping long bats of marshmallow into drums of melted chocolate.
Holidays commandeer much of Hammond’s product. Workers start making Christmas candy in January. Enter the factory now, and you’ll find plenty of hearts for Valentine’s Day, and a lot of pastel-colored sweets for Easter.
Camp, 27, started at Hammond’s nine years ago in packaging and got three cavities his first month on the job. He worked his way into the candy room, discovered a passion for the craft and inched his way up to his current position, basically the head candy guy.
One of his specialties is “art candy,” the hard candies with Santas and other pictures in them. Pictures on most hard candies are just stamps, but not at Hammond’s.
During a recent morning, Camp first poured a kettle of bubbling sugar onto a metal table, then dabbed areas of the sheet with colors.
Once the syrup stiffened to something that could be folded, he added flavoring from cups, cut the sheet into color- coordinated blobs, and then snipped and rolled the blobs into shapes that he carefully piled together.
Camp placed the mass of stiff syrup into a machine that helped him stretch it into hundreds of 3-foot wands the diameter of a cigar. Cut a nub from the wand and who’s looking right back at you? Santa.
“It’s a labor of love,” says Camp. “I can’t sit at a desk and do desk work. I’m a cook. I want to be in the kitchen cooking.”
Tip: If you eat a lot of candy, brush your teeth!
Douglas Brown
