Homemade Lemon and Ginger Cough Drops

This is a recipe for everyone and anyone that likes to make a homemade version of something you can buy in stores. Today, we are going to make our very own cough drops, throat sweets, soothing lozenges, whatever you want to call them. This  easy recipe to make your own homemade Lemon and Ginger cough drops is based off my recipe for Ginger Chews. The difference however, is that we are going to take the temperature up much higher so that the cough drops are hard and not chewy.  

So we start off making a decoction which is really just a fancy word for boiling some ingredients in water to extract the flavours and beneficial components out of them.  

We make the decoction by chopping up ¼ cup of ginger and ¼ cup of fresh lemon (if you don’t have fresh lemon, you can use 2 tablespoons of lemon juice) and placing it in a pot with 2 cups of water. Then you simmer that mixture over a medium temperature for roughly 30 minutes. You want to allow half the water to evaporate so that you are left with more or less, 1 cup of liquid once strained. 

So after simmering for 30 minutes, strain the mixture using a sieve and place the liquid back into the pot. Add the sugar and glucose syrup (if you don’t have glucose syrup, you can use honey). Before heating it up, prepare the surface for the cough drops. I used a marble cheese board and sprayed it with cooking spray so that I could remove the cough drops easily. 

Now that your surface is ready, heat the sugar and decoction mixture and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Once the sugar has dissolved, avoid stirring the liquid. You can shake the saucepan a little every now and then to distribute the heat. 

It is preferable to use a candy thermometer for this as you need the temperature to go up to the hard crack stage where there is almost no water left in the mixture. The temperature for the hard crack stage is between 300-310°F or 148-154°C . If you don’t have a candy thermometer, you can test the mixture by dropping a little of the mixture into a cup of cold water – if it hardens it is ready. This however can be deceiving. At worst, you will set your cough drops out on the board and they will be soft chewy cough drops. If you really want to make sure you get it right, make sure you have a candy thermometer.  

It will look like there is virtually no mixture left in the pot and it will look very caramel coloured and it will be bubbling all over the show. As soon as it hits the hard crack stage, remove from the heat and using a teaspoon, drop one teaspoon of mixture on the greased surface / dish and continue doing that teaspoon by teaspoon making sure there is enough space between them 

Once the cough drops have set, you can mix the cornflour and icing sugar together and sprinkle that over the cough drops and then place in an airtight container. 

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