Pinterest Fail- Vinegar Taffy

I have a fond childhood memory of making vinegar taffy one evening for family night. It was a one time thing, but I remember it being really fun. Since then, I have always wanted to try it again. Andrew has also recently been interested in learning how to make candy, so I figured that this would be a good first to try. I found several recipes online, but I settled on one that you can find here, courtesy of the How Does She? blog, if you are interested. It has really good step by step pictures and pretty good instructions. I figured that it was a fool proof recipe. This is what the candy looked like on the blog:

This is what our candy ended up looking like:

We had a lot of fun, even though it clearly didn't work. I think our problem was that we didn't have a candy thermometer, and we boiled it too long. It ended up getting really hard, really fast. This blog told us to boil the mixture until it was in the "hard crack" stage, while many other recipes I saw said to go only until the "soft ball" stage. Oh well. We had a good laugh in the meantime. Unfortunately, in order to save on future dental bills, we had to throw it away. It wasn't quite hard candy, and it wasn't quite taffy, so it was just the right consistency to pull out fillings. Better safe than sorry!