Don’t just keep your freeze-dried adventure confined to snacking from the bag—there are so many more options for freeze-dried candy, and that includes using them in your baking. Just like you can utilize regular candy in your baking to add some pizzazz, you can use freeze-dried candy for an even more unique baking and tasting experience. The possibilities are limitless, but here are a couple of ideas to get your creative gears turning!
1. Add It to Your Batter for an Extra Surprise
Let’s think about vanilla cupcakes. Delicious, yes, but relatively predictable. You bite into one, expecting fluffy vanilla cake, which you receive, but then there is a soft crunch and a burst of strawberry flavour flooding your mouth. It’s a strawberry-flavoured freeze-dried pillow candy! You smile, pleased by this unexpected but delicious surprise in your ordinary-looking vanilla cupcake. By adding freeze-dried candy to your baking batter or dough, you’ve created a little everyday magic.
2. Grind Freeze-Dried Candies Down for Taste
If you have a food processor handy, a mortar and pestle, or even the side of a knife and a hard surface, try grinding up your freeze dried-candies and mixing the powder into your cookie dough, cake batter, or whatever treat you’re making for a fun twist. Freeze-dried candy often has an enhanced flavour, so turning it into a powder will imbue that intense flavour throughout your baked goods (and maybe the bright colours too). You’ll have to try it to find out!
3. Make Freeze-Dried Candy the Star of Your Dish
You may have a totally unique idea that makes freeze-dried candy the focal point of your dish. Go for it! There are so many different kinds of candy you can play with, like skittles, jolly ranchers, gummy bears, and more. How can you make freeze-dried jolly ranchers into the central dessert at your next Sunday night dinner? Will you stack them? Will you chop them up? Will you separate flavours or mix them all up? It’s up to you, and we can’t wait to see what you can come up with.
4. Sprinkle It on Top for Decoration
Something fun and exciting about freeze-dried treats is their bright colours! In particular, freeze-dried skittles are extremely vivid. Imagine them garnishing the top of a cake or spotting some cookie dough—there’s no end to the possibilities! Add some brightness to an ice cream sundae or a burst of interest to a plain pastry. Create checkerboards with Starbursts, woodland scenes with gummy bears, or whimsical wonderlands of saltwater taffy. Keep it classy, or go wild! Freeze-dried candy is so versatile you can create whatever you want to.
5. Chop Them up for Added Crunch
Utilize the signature airy crunch of freeze-dried candy to your advantage by chopping them up and adding them to your baked goods for an extra crunch. You could sprinkle them on top, create a candy-crumb crust, or embed them in your batter. It’s truly up to you, and we recommend trying whatever you can imagine. Your ideas might create similar experiences or totally different ones.
6. Let Your Imagination Run Wild
The possibilities for freeze-dried candy experiments are endless! Anything you can envision, we recommend trying. The wildest ideas can have the most amazing results. You only know once you try it. You can even learn to freeze-dry your own candy without a machine. But if you want to get to your experimenting fast with ready-made candy, you can easily order a variety of freeze-dried treats from That Sweet Lyfe!