Tips & Images from making xylitol hard candies
Ramblings
Here is an example of five strips, 2 LorAnn's Lime and 3 LorAnn's Watermelon. These are the strips or sticks made using the siguie method and each is approximately 25g or 125g in total. You can see that they are all approximately 13 inches in length and have a few irregularities
If you look closely one stick is broken and up close you will see on either sides of the break is what I call the sugar cube structure, this is an area with large crystal formation. Other areas appear completely opaque and will have a smoother glassy texture.
This is what happens when crystallization occurs prematurely. As you can see it is not a big problem, and the rest of the stick is fine. If you like you can break off that area and remelt it and cast it again or you can just not worry about it. I tend to get these because I reuse the parchment paper 3 or 4 times and some seed crystals get in the next pour. The image above is the extreme case but in general you get some variation in texture which I kind of like. I also have some people who have become quite adept at looking at the candies and choosing the texture they like based on opacity and crystal structure {yeah we're all chemists}.
You can't really see it in the images but some parts are completely opaque while others are very slightly translucent. The opaque ones are the hardest and most glass like while the translucent ones are hard but can be bitten through. It's when you can see the grain of the individual crystals that you know it's going to be a sugar cube.
Storage
One of the great advantages of xylitol candies is that unlike sucrose candies they are not hygroscopic {pick up moisture from the air} so you do not need to pack them in air tight containers. For this reason I tend to reuse Laughing Cow wedge cheese containers. They are wide making it easy for people to sort through and choose the flavor and texture they want plus they stack and store nicely.
Incidentally 125g fits very well in these containers AND is very close to the common 4oz size that many xylitol candies come in.
Healing Teeth instead of Filling Them: Our forum thread with a lot of good info and even more pointless ramblings.
