If there are artisanal salts, why not artisanal sugars? Kara’s recipe for re-purposing broken pieces of holiday candy like peppermint candy canes is pure genius. Although the red and white striping will be lost (alas), imagine all the shades of granulated sugar you can produce by grinding candy canes or other hard candies in a clean coffee grinder.   Play with the settings, and you can produce an infinite range of sugar from all sorts of hard candy (and even fractured lollipops) - flavors like grape, mint, butterscotch, root beer, cherry, cinnamon and strawberry. Get your hands on a "party mix" bag of hard candy and there's no end to the color-combinations you can come up with. Play with tart and sour, lemon or lime hard candies, and you've got a whole new kind of sugar to play with, designed to make you pucker along with your sugar rush. 

 

Storage tip: Lightly dust with powdered sugar and place into an airtight jar in a dark cool place.