Where do candy canes come from?

While in Stowe we heard they were having a candy cane making demonstration at the local chocolate shop. I found it fascinating- one of those great "how does that actually work" sort of experiences. When we walked in we were immediately blasted with peppermint fumes (great at clearing the sinuses, by the way); apparently they had just added the pepperment oil to the 5 pounds of sugar and 10 pounds of corn syrup. They start by heating the mixture up to around 300 F, and it stays at around 200 F the whole time they're working with it (they wear 2 sets of gloves and still have to trade off handling it).

The mixture is a dark amber color at first, and they scrape it from pan to pan with a big metal spatula (you can see one of the pans below), using butter to keep it from sticking to the pan and their gloves. The transferring process helps to cool the mixture and to add air to it. Once it finally starts to stay together into a sort of lump, they heave it up onto a big cast iron hook which hangs on the wall.

They then proceed to pull it down, lift it back up onto the hook, pull it down again, and so on, which is apparently is the best way to add air to the candy. As they did this process, you could start to see the mixture look whiter and whiter. It looked like hard work, lifting up the 15 pounds and pulling it down and lifting it up again.

Once they felt it was ready, they took the "loaf" and put it under a heat lamp. They then took some red sugar/corn syrup mixture that had been heating on the side and after cooling it down a bit, added big thick slabs of it to the outside of the white loaf. It really didn't remotely resemble anything candy cane-like at this point. More like a meatloaf.
But then, voila, one of the women took the end and started pulling and twisting it, and out came a beautiful candy cane rod.
She would cut it off periodically and pass it to the next candy cane worker, who rolled it to keep it round while it cooled. Then the final step was making the crook in the cane before it became too cool.
They let any interested kids and grownups roll one of the candy canes themselves. My handiwork is below. It tasted really good too!