These stay nice and soft and moist for days after making them and they do not get super sticky. Once you roll them in sugar they will stay non-sticky.
You can add any kind of extract and colour to these.
I may have overheated my sugar/corn syrup as it had yellowed (I will have to test my candy thermometer) and this would influence the final colour of the candy. Mine turned out kind of orange-y when I added the yellow.
The fruit pectin is what makes them gel and solidify (same stuff you use to make jam and jelly). I am not aware of any substitutes.
You could probably use a thick syrup or honey in place of the corn syrup but I've never tried it, so I can't tell you if the results will be good or not.
Some stores may sell this as "liquid glucose"
You do need a candy thermometer for this. You can determine if you have reached the "soft crack" stage by dropping a small amount of the boiling liquid into some ice water. There are photos and resources online that may help you understand this if you google "candy making stages"
Like this one:
http://candy.about.com/od/candybasics...
For those of you that will say "this has a lot of sugar in it", yes this does, this is candy.
I am not recommending that you eat this for dinner for a week. It has the same amount of sugar as the gumdrops you would buy at a store.
I'm sure you could try to put these in silicone molds to form shapes (if you don't like the cube shape), the trick would be finding small enough ones. These is very sweet and needs to be in small pieces.
Recipe:
1 cup sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
3/4 cup water
1 package (1 3/4 oz) powdered fruit pectin (I used 4.5 tablespoons).
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons of flavoured extract (lemon, orange, cherry, peppermint etc)
1 teaspoon of citrus peel (for orange or lemon gumdrops)
Food colour (optional)
Additional granulated sugar for rolling gumdrops in after completion.
Line a 9x5" loaf pan with aluminum foil and grease the foil with butter or cooking spray.
In a large saucepan combine the corn syrup and 1 cup sugar and heat mixture on med-high, stirring constantly until it boils.
'
**note *** The original recipe calls for spraying the saucepan with cooking spray prior to adding the ingredients, it did this, but I found that it didn't make much of a difference in clean up. The sugar stuck to the sides anyway
Once boiling stir only occasionally.
Continue to boil about 9 minutes until the mixture reaches 280F (soft crack stage).
Once it has reached that temperature, take it off the heat.
While the sugar/ corn syrup is boiling you can prepare the following:
In a medium saucepan combine the water, pectin and baking soda (it will foam up a bit). Cook and stir over high heat until mixture boils (about 2 minutes, it won't take long).
I say cook it for two minutes in the video, but it takes two minutes to come to a boil, once it is at a boil, turn the heat off.
Carefully pour the corn syrup mixture in a thin stream into the pectin mixture, stirring constantly. Cook and stir one minute longer over medium high heat.
Remove from heat, add food colour, extract and citrus peel (if using it) and stir.
Pour into prepared loaf pan and let stand until firm.
Cut into squares and roll in additional sugar if desired.
I kept these in a container at room temperature.
