Instructions: Lightly spray each mold with vegetable-oil cooking spray. Use your fingers to spread the spray around inside the mold and into all its little crevices. Set the prepared molds aside while you cook the sugar.

Combine sugar, 3/4 cup water, and corn syrup in a 2-quart heavy-bottomed saucepan, and place over medium-high heat. The corn syrup will make the cooked sugar harder and crunchier. It will also help prevent the cooked sugar from melting as quickly. Stir the sugar mixture gently and slowly to ensure that it cooks evenly (if you do not stir it, there will be hot spots where the sugar will cook faster than in the rest of the mixture). Dip a clean pastry brush in cold water and brush the inside of the pan clean several times as the sugar cooks, to prevent the sugar from recrystallizing. Insert a candy thermometer into mixture, and cook the sugar mixture to 310 degrees to 320 degrees, known as the "hard-crack" stage.

Remove the pan from the heat and pour sugar mixture into a heatproof measuring cup with a spout. Add the desired flavoring and food coloring to the hot sugar, and carefully stir it in using a wooden skewer or chopstick. Immediately pour the hot sugar into the molds, filling them to the top. Set the sticks in place by inserting them just far enough to be secure within each mold. Set the molds aside to allow the sugar to cool completely. When cooled, simply pop out the lollipops.

This recipe yields about 2 dozen, depending on molds.

Comments: Originally, a lollipop was a hard candy without a stick. Lollipops are mentioned in a number of Charles Dickens novels. The word "lolly" is an eighteenth-century term for "mouth." The earliest lollipop with a stick was a hard candy stuck onto the end of a slate pencil. It first appeared in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Confectioner George Smith started making hard candy on a stick and named it after his favorite racehorse, Lollypop. Smiths company adopted the name for its candy on a stick and patented the name in 1931.

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