House Records · Craft Caveats
Allergen & Craft Disclaimer
What is in a batch, what shares a room with a batch, and why two cook days never produce an identical drop. Read this before you send a tasting box to someone with a restricted diet.
What every batch begins with
Cane sugar, glucose syrup and filtered water form the base of every hard drop we pour. From there a batch takes its character from steeped botanicals, orchard fruit reductions, whole spices and a small quantity of food-grade essential oil. The anise clove squares also carry a fine dusting of cornstarch so the pieces do not marry in the tray.
- Cane sugar and glucose syrup in every batch
- Sassafras root bark, horehound leaf, anise seed and clove bud in the root and herb families
- Oregon orchard fruit — pear, apple and huckleberry — in the fruit families
- Citric acid for the sour drops and a pinch of flake salt in the green apple entry
- Cornstarch on the pressed squares and powdered pastilles
The cook floor shares a room
Our kitchen is one open room with two kettles and a single slab. While no drop recipe calls for milk, wheat flour, egg, peanut or tree nut, those ingredients are used in the adjoining pastry side of the Hollow during the same working week. We clean between cooks and dedicate utensils where we can, but we cannot describe any piece as produced in a room that has never seen those ingredients.
If you are ordering for a household managing a food allergy, please say so in your email before we assemble a tin. We would rather tell you honestly what we can and cannot promise than have a gift arrive with a surprise in it.
Botanical ingredients are not medicine
Sassafras, horehound, anise, clove and violet are used here as flavoring traditions, in the manner of an old candy counter. Nothing in this archive is offered as a remedy, a treatment or a substitute for advice from a physician or pharmacist. Horehound and honey lemon lozenges are confections that happen to taste like the apothecary shelf, not preparations for a cough.
Variation between batches
A nine-kilo cook is small enough for the weather to matter. Humidity in the Valley shifts how quickly a slab sets. Essential oils fade slightly over a long steep. Pears in October carry more sugar than pears in August. What does not change is the ledger line: the same bark, the same steep, the same crack stage, checked against the previous entry by taste before the batch is packed.
Storage and keeping
- Keep tins closed and away from direct sunlight and radiator heat.
- A cool pantry is ideal; a refrigerator invites condensation and sticky drops.
- Hard drops hold their snap for several months; the pressed squares are best within ten weeks.
- Powdered pastilles will slowly absorb moisture, so keep them in the glassine sleeve.
- If a drop goes soft, it will still taste right — the texture simply relaxes.
Small pieces and small guests
Hard candy is a choking shape by nature. Our drops are cut small, but they are still firm pieces, and we recommend supervising any guest under five and offering a softer confection instead. This is the same caution our cooks extend at the counter when a grandparent buys a tin for a household with toddlers.
Speaking plainly about a batch
If a question about ingredients, shared equipment or cook dates is not answered here, ask it directly at sorrelhollowcandies@gmail.com and name the archive entry you have in mind. We answer with the batch ledger open in front of us.
Related house pages: Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and Our Confectionery.