Author: The Hippo Press

caramel-covered, candy-coated, chocolatey taste of fall on a stick

By John Fladd

jfladd@hippopress.com

The end of September is the height of apple season and most of us have fond memories of eating caramel apples as children. Now apple-on-a-stick desserts are being served at birthday parties, Halloween gatherings, and even weddings, as whimsical place settings with more elaborate decorations and multiple layers of sweet coating and toppings.

What goes into a truly great caramel or candy apple or chocolate-covered apple?

Caramel Apple Key to Greatness #1 – Be choosy with your apples

The key to a great caramel apple, according to Jeffrey Bart, owner of Granite State Candy Shoppe (13 Warren St., Concord, 225-2591; 832 Elm St., Manchester, 218-3885, granitestatecandyshoppe.com), is choosing the right apple.

“We don’t use Granny Smiths,” he said. “We use other apples that tend to be a little on the sweeter side. That will change throughout the season depending on what’s freshest and most available. So we’ve used everything from Zestars and then Honeycrisp later in the season when they’re available.” Because Granite State’s caramel apples are a seasonal offering, he said, it’s important to choose apples that are perfectly ripe and at their best.

Linda Comrie disagrees. Not about the importance of choosing the right apple — that’s very important, she said, but her preference is for Granny Smiths. Comrie owns Sweet Dreams Confections (553-6347, facebook.com/sweetdreamsconfections01), a homestead bakery in Derry. She, too, only makes caramel apples during fall months.

“I try to always source with local ingredients, first of all,” Comrie said. “So I’m thankful now that apple season is in season. I go to local orchards,” she said, “and I use Granny Smith apples. The tartness of the green apple, this Granny Smith apple, really accents any caramel or chocolate or whatever candies you’re going to add to your caramel apple in the final product. When you have a sweeter apple, it can sometimes be too much. And also it’s the firm construction of the apple, which makes it much more conducive because you do have to boil your apples before you coat them.”

Boiling apples briefly, she explained, is a way to make certain the skins make good contact with the caramel, especially if they are supermarket apples.

“There is always a coating,” she said. “You can go directly to an apple orchard, but if you buy from the grocery store, there’s like a little bit of a film on them, there’s a wax on them, and you have to remove the wax.” Even if the apples don’t have a layer of wax, she said, boiling them briefly removes any natural oils that might be on the skin. “You’re making sure that you can get a good adhesion with your caramel. And you want it to stick to the apple.”

Leah Boudreault, owner of Sugar and Slice NH (facebook.com/Sugarandslicenh) in Milford, uses a different method.

“Some people say to boil them in hot water,” Boudreault said. “I don’t do that. I will usually rinse them really well in really hot water and then I will give them a light wipe with some vinegar. That gets rid of all of that heavy waxy coating and it makes all of the toppings stick to it much better.”

Boudreault, too, uses apples that are as crunchy as possible.

“I like apples that aren’t going to get soft and mushy,” she said. “I like Honeycrisps; that’s one of my favorite apples. I like Pink Ladies. And then if I have to I’ll use a McIntosh.”

Paul Cornell, co-owner of Chocolate Moose (184 N. Broadway, Salem, 893-2225), is another fan of Granny Smiths. He makes caramel apples year-round, and the tart, green apples are almost always available, but that is the least of his reasons for using them.

“The Granny Smith apple is core,” he said. “It’s a little bit more tart, a little bit crispier, a little bit hardier, and that offsets that sweetness from the toppings. You’ve got to have a crisp apple. We’ve tried other apples. We’ve had people come in and say, ‘I want to try a Matsu apple. I want to try a Red Delicious apple.’ They’re too soft. We’ll do it, but once we do it, they’re like, ‘OK, OK, back to the Granny Smith.’ For the most part, I think our organic Granny Smiths are just what has to do with all the oohs and ahhs that we get from the apples.”

For Chris Guerrette, owner of Lickee’s and Chewy’s Candy and Creamery (53 Washington St., Dover, 343-1799, lickeesnchewys.com), the need for perfect apples rises to a whole other level. He starts by picking them himself.

“We only use fresh apples that we pick ourselves every single week from the orchard,” Guerrette said. “We use a local orchard in Milton, and we’ve been working with the family orchard for eight or nine years. And we only use Honeycrisp apples once they’re ready. They’re nice and firm and they have the perfect flavor to go with our caramel. The earlier that you get them in their lifespan, the better. And the thing is, as compared to, say, a store-bought, maybe those green apples that tend to be pretty firm, these have a better flavor to them [that contrasts] with the caramel. It’s a more natural sweetness and tartness, just a nice balance. We start with the best ingredients, like the nice, super-fresh apples I picked this morning, and they’re literally being dipped right now.”

Using the freshest possible apples can lead to a hectic apple season, Guerrette said. “We literally will go out as a team once a week and pick the apples in the mornings. And then we have a big event every year where we have to make about 1,500 apples in one week for Apple Harvest Day here in Dover. And then we’ll spend the next six days making a batch a day every day for five or six, eight days. So they’ll be ready. My poor chocolatiers all had blisters by the end of that, last year.”

Dover’s Apple Harvest Day 2025 festival will take place Saturday, Oct. 4, rain or shine, on Central Street in Dover from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. It will feature a 5K road race, more than 100 vendors, and a not insignificant number of apples. Visit appleharvestday.com.

Caramel Apple Key to Greatness #2 – Make your own caramel, and don’t be stingy with it

The next step to making a great caramel or candy apple is coating it with caramel or candy. This represents two different directions an apple can go in. Candy apples are coated with a thin layer of hardened sugar, usually bright red in color, hence the color name “candy-apple red.” This provides a brittle crunchyness to contrast with the crisp juiciness of the apple beneath. This is the approach Leah Boudreault from Sugar and Slice takes.

“I make everything,” Boudreault said. “For instance, last year I had a really big apple order for somebody’s wedding and I did caramel apples, I did candy apples, I did chocolate-dipped apples. So I can do pretty much everything, with any topping.” But her standard go-to, she said, is a classic red candy coating: “It’s basically sugar, water, corn syrup and food dye. So it’s just really sweet.” The first time she used a candy coating on apples, she said, was for an event that was themed around the Pixar movie The Incredibles and needed a bright red color. “I took it on knowing very little about candy apples. Once I did that, I saw how easy it was. And I have been doing them every year since.” The candy coating provides a substrate to work on, she said, like painting with a layer of primer before adding the top coat.

More common is a caramel coating. Universally, the caramel apple-makers interviewed for this story emphasized how important it is to make their own caramel.

“We use a caramel that I developed for close to two years,” Chris Guerrette from Lickee’s and Chewy’s said. “It took two years of minor tweaks and changes until it became this perfect. And that’s cooked in a big copper kettle for several hours. So it’s nice and dark, and it’s got a lot of great flavors, some like special fall flavors in it. It’s not this kind of old, sticky caramel. It doesn’t stick to your teeth as much as it used to when I was a kid.”

According to Paul Cornell from Chocolate Moose, the only way to improve on a good caramel coating is to use more caramel.

“A caramel apple is a caramel apple,” Cornell said, “but if you bite into a caramel apple at any state fair, they’re thin. There’s just really not that much caramel on it. You bite into ours, you’re up to your gums in caramel before you get to that apple. And that’s what we want. I think that puts us above the rest of anybody that’s kind of competing in this field.”

“The caramel itself,” Cornell said, “a homemade caramel, just makes a world of difference when you’re making these apples. It’s got the right texture, it’s got the right thickness. Homemade caramel, made the right way, the right texture, the right sweetness, and the thickness, of course, is key.”

Reni Mylonas, owner of Agape Cakes and Confections (59 Route 27, Raymond, 244-2265, agapecandc.com) agrees.

“We use a nice thick layer of caramel,” she said, “so you’re getting a good caramel-to-apple ratio.” She said that one of the appeals of a good caramel apple is the contrast in textures between the chewiness of the caramel, and the crispness of the apple. “The contrast of an apple to the type of caramel that we use, is just a really good combination that we really enjoy.”

Maria Marini is the chocolatier at Lighthouse Local (21 Kilton Road, Bedford, 716-6983, lighthouse-local.com). According to her, making caramel for apples involves the constant scrutiny of several temperatures simultaneously. Bringing the caramel to the right temperature can be tricky — a difference of just a few degrees can result in a weak, runny texture or a pull-your-teeth-out consistency with undertones of burnt sugar.

“We have a copper pan,” Marini said. “It distributes the heat evenly, but copper pots come in different thicknesses, and the thinner the pot the darker the caramel gets. Once the caramel is at a certain temperature, I dip all the apples in it.” Because she adds a coat of chocolate to most of Lighthouse Local’s caramel apples — “about three quarters of them,” she said — there is an extra level of complexity. “It takes two hours [for the caramel] just to really get cool enough that if I add the chocolate to it, it’s not going to change the temperature of the chocolate, because chocolate has to be tempered too, which means it has to be at a certain temperature. If this isn’t cooled down enough, and I use the chocolate while the caramel’s still warm, it can make the chocolate bloom, which means you get white spots.

On top of that, she said, if she wants to roll the chocolate-covered caramel apple in toppings, the chocolate has to be at just the right temperature — cool enough to adhere to the caramel but still tacky enough for toppings to stick to it. “I have to do it while it’s still wet,” she said.

The caramel dipping process is not without risks. Emily Lewis is a production manager at Van Otis Chocolates (341 Elm St., Manchester, 627-1611, vanotis.com) and teaches caramel apple decorating workshops. Her students decorate apples that have already been dipped in caramel, she said, to keep civilians from burning themselves.

“We cook our caramel up to 242 degrees Fahrenheit,” Lewis said, adding that proper dipping technique is a must. “When we’re dipping [apples] in the caramel, the only technique is that the stick has to be all the way into the apple. Otherwise, you’ll lose your apple into the caramel. And we like to call the actual dipping ‘milking the cow.’ We dip two apples at a time, so it almost looks like you’re milking a cow, as you’re shaking them up and down.” It’s easier on your wrists, she said, if you hold the apples upside down by their sticks, like daggers. After being covered with caramel, all of Van Otis’ apples receive a coating of white, milk or dark chocolate.

Caramel Apple Key to Greatness #3 – It’s almost impossible to go overboard with toppings

In theory, an apple-dipper could stop at this point. You’ve got your apple. You’ve got your candy or caramel coating. It is, by definition, a candy or caramel apple. Paul Cornell from Chocolate Moose said that only the most die-hard of caramel apple purists ask for this stripped-down version.

“We make 30 different kinds,” Cornell said. “We make a plain Jane version. We use that apple for big events — weddings, anniversaries, birthday parties — 300 of them at a time.” He said that customers might order that apple for financial reasons, but most customers want some sort of topping on top of the caramel.

“I’d say we have five, maybe six [toppings] that are the staples of our apples,” Cornell said. “That’s a pecan, that’s an M&M, a Reese’s, a Heath Bar, apple pie — and all of these have different ingredients on it. But our customers have built our apple base. As time has gone on (and we’ve been doing this for 30 years), people would come in and say, ‘Could you put this on this apple?’ It’s as wild as gummy bears. It’s ‘Can you do almonds and coconut? Almond Joy?’ Then there’s different chocolates — milk, white and dark. So you can mix it up. I would say we’ve probably made anywhere between 20 and 30 different kinds at one time.”

Reni Mylonas from Agape Cakes has had a similar experience. “We do some that are just the plain ones,” she said, ”but then we almost always add additional things to it. Sometimes we add rainbow sprinkles to them or chocolate sprinkles or a chocolate drizzle or some type of candy like an M&M. We’ve done a Twix [version] in the past or a KitKat, something that’s just a little bit more decadent.” She said that her shop does not sell chocolate-dipped apples. The concentration is on one perfect layer of caramel. “We add chocolate toppings, like sprinkles,” she said, “or swirls of chocolate across the surface, but we don’t cover them completely.”

“Our signature [apple], I think,” Chris Guerrette from Lickee’s and Chewy’s said, “and the one that is the most popular, is a white chocolate cinnamon pecan apple. It’s based on a recipe for cinnamon-roasted pecans that my mom developed when I was a kid. We use that recipe, then grind those up. We put the caramel on [the apple], then we dip it in … chocolate — an extremely high-quality, gourmet white chocolate. And then the last step is rolling that in the cinnamon-roasted pecans.”

Coatings and decorations can get more elaborate from there, Guerrette said.

“We decorate a lot of [the apples] with some really extravagant chocolate decorations. We actually create animals and creatures out of these, like teddy bears and elephants and fun things like that.” He said the apples he sells fall into three basic categories. “It’s about 30/50/20,” he said. “Probably 30 percent are plain caramel, or caramel with extra toppings. Another 50 percent have [a coating of] chocolate, and another 20 percent are our super-fancy ones with a lot of decorations or shaped like creatures and stuff like that.”

Jeff Bart at Granite State Candy is excited about premiering a new caramel apple this year.

“It’s our Dubai Caramel Apple,” Bart said. “We make a special pistachio filling. It’s a blending of chocolate and pistachio paste that we’re using in our Dubai bars. Then we’re using the kataifi [shredded philo dough] in the center, so it has that crunch. Then we are dipping it in milk chocolate afterward. There’s all kinds of different textures and flavors, and they all come together.” According to the staff at Granite State Candy’s Manchester store, while a few of the apples they sell are plain caramel, or caramel with toppings, the large majority of their apples are covered with a layer of chocolate.

Unlike many other caramel apple makers, Linda Comrie from Sweet Dreams Confections doesn’t cover the caramel layer with an additional layer of chocolate. She will, however, drizzle the caramel with chocolate once it is firm, she said. If a customer orders a chocolate-covered apple, she’ll make it, even without a caramel layer, if that’s what the customer wants.

“You have to be mindful of what chocolate you use, though,” she said. “You can’t use a chocolate chip, for instance. If you melt your chocolate chips, it’s not going to work the same. You’ll want to use something like a bark, if you will, like an almond bark. Or even like Ghirardelli makes a melting wafer, but it’s actual chocolate opposed to something that might be more of a candy. I’ve done both, but I do find, for me, that using the caramel base is a much better process.”

“People like a little bit of a variation,” said Leah Boudreault of Sugar and Slice NH. She uses colored fondant to add elaborate details to her apples. (Her candy coating makes an excellent base for this).

“A lot of times my customers will come to me and they’ll already have a photo in mind. They’ll send me inspiration photos — ‘Hey, can you recreate this? Or can you do something similar?’ And if they don’t come to me with like an inspo photo, I’ll ask them questions like, do you have a theme? Do you have favorite colors? And then from there if I need help with designs I usually use Google, and I will look at some inspiration myself.”

Caramel Apple Key to Greatness #4 – Be prepared for hugeness

As you might imagine, a caramel apple can get out of control if you don’t exercise some restraint, which is antithetical to the whole idea of caramel apples. If you start with a good-sized apple, then cover it with a generous amount of caramel, then add a host of toppings, before you know it, it has gotten much bigger than you anticipated.

“There’s such a variety of apples, size-wise,” Paul Cornell said. “You can get a 56-count apple, which is as big as a softball when you get it. You get into the bigger ones, people love them because once you put all the stuff on it it’s as big as a basketball. I mean, it gets huge.”

“They tend to be pretty large” said Chris Guerrette from Lickee’s and Chewy’s. “One of these apples that when we’re done with it — with the chocolate and the decorations on it — can be about a pound and a half. They’re kind of a meal you can share with other people.”