Cinnamon candies rewards a little know-how: how to choose them, cook them, store them, and substitute in a pinch. Browse 17 recipes to cook with them.

What are cinnamon candies?

Cinnamon candies are small, hard red candies flavored not with cinnamon bark but with cinnamon oil, which carries a sharp, hot, almost spicy burn. Most cooks know them as Red Hots or cinnamon imperials, the tiny crimson spheres sold in cellophane bags near the cash register.

They are a sugar candy at heart, so heat melts them into a clear, fiery-red syrup. That dual nature, candy you can suck on or melt down, is exactly what makes them useful in the kitchen well beyond snacking.

What you are really buying is two things at once. A jolt of cinnamon heat and an intense, fast-dissolving red dye. Recipes lean on one or the other, and often both.

Cooking With Cinnamon Candies

Their headline trick is coloring and flavoring apple dishes in one step. Stirred into hot applesauce or apple jelly, they melt completely and turn the whole batch glossy pink-red with a warm cinnamon bite.

That is the entire idea behind Microwave Red Hot Apple Jelly and Spicy Applesauce Mold, where a handful of candies does the work of both food coloring and a spice jar. Candied Apples and Candy Apple Cheese Pie use the same melt to tint and flavor the fruit.

For poaching, drop the candies into the simmering liquid for pears or apple slices. As in Painted Peach Cake and Baked Oranges, they dye the fruit a deep rose and leave a spiced syrup behind for spooning over.

On cookies they switch jobs and stay solid. New Zealand Holly Cookies and Cherry Tree Cookies press whole candies on as bright red berries, and Flat Cat Cookies use them as a nose or eyes, since they hold their shape and color through a short bake.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Cinnamon candies belong with apple above all, then with pear or peach and a hit of orange. They also play the festive red note in Christmas and Valentine baking, where the color does as much as the flavor.

The most common mistake is scorching them. Pure sugar burns fast, so melt the candies over low heat with a splash of water or fruit juice and stir constantly until dissolved. Walk away and you get a smoking, bitter, hard-to-clean mess at the bottom of the pan.

The second mistake is adding too many. The cinnamon oil is potent, and a spoonful too much turns a pleasant warmth into a throat-catching heat that overwhelms the fruit. Start with the amount called for, taste, then add more.

Want the red without much heat? That is hard with these, since the dye and the cinnamon oil come together. Reach for plain food coloring when you need crimson without the spice.

Substitutes

There is no clean one-to-one swap, because few things deliver red color and cinnamon heat at once. The closest is ground cinnamon plus a little red food coloring, using roughly ¼ teaspoon of cinnamon and a few drops of dye for every 2 tablespoons of candies, adjusted to taste.

For the flavor alone, ground cinnamon or a couple of cinnamon sticks simmered in the liquid will spice applesauce or poaching syrup, just without the candy's sweetness or color. Add a little extra sugar to make up for what the candies would have brought.

Cinnamon schnapps or a drop of cinnamon extract works in a sauce where you do not need the dye.

For cookie decorating, any small round red candy stands in for the berry look, even a red candy-coated chocolate.

Buying and Storing

Look for them by the names Red Hots, cinnamon imperials, or simply cinnamon candies, usually in the baking aisle around the holidays and in the candy aisle year-round. Both the tiny round imperials and the slightly larger Red Hots melt the same way.

Being hard sugar candy, they keep almost indefinitely when sealed and dry, easily a year or more. Their enemy is humidity: exposed to moist air they turn tacky, clump into a solid red brick, and start to bleed color.

Store them airtight at room temperature, away from heat and steam. Keep them out of the fridge, where the damp air makes the sticking worse.

If a bag has fused into one mass, you can usually still melt it down for applesauce or jelly, so it is rarely a total loss.

Quick facts

In Chinese

肉桂糖果

British (UK) term

Cinnamon candies

en français

bonbons à la cannelle

en español

dulces de canela

Recipes using cinnamon candies

There are 17 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 17 recipes