One of the pastry classes at the Oregon Coast Culinary Institute took on a big task this year.
They learned how to recreate preservative-laden childhood favorites without using the preservatives or the machines
that are typically used to engineer candies like gummy worms, Zingers and lollipops. And then they made them giant.
At their final exhibition, there were cupcakes and candies that would have fit in perfectly at Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Perhaps the most impressive was the creation made by Brandon Finley: a giant tootsie pop. Pictured here, the lollipop weighed more than 40 pounds and used a 24-inch french rolling pin as a "stick." The chocolate tootsie center weighed about 15 pounds alone. Finley said that he had planned to make the confection larger, but the school actually ran out of sugar after the other students finished their projects and Finley used more that 25 pounds of it in his.
I wonder how many licks it took to get to the center of that pop.
[Image The Worldlink]









