Twice A Day After Meals (Gordon and Durward's Scottish Tablet)

Member Name: Emmald

Product:	Gordon and Durward's Scottish Tablet
Date:	09/04/09 (113 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A very sweet Scottish tradition

Disadvantages: High in sugar and contains goodness knows how many calories!

We consider ourselves lucky, we have family scattered all over the British Isles so there is no shortage of inexpensive holiday homes for us to visit.
If we head off towards Dundee more often than not we go sightseeing in Angus and Perthshire and on one of our visits we came across the Scottish sweetie shop called Gordon and Durward.
They are situated in West High Street, Crieff. The whole shop is the nearest thing to paradise for any sweetie lover!
Not only do we replenish our own stocks but we have to take some souvenir sweeties home for the next door neighbour who put our wheelie bin out while we were away and the kind friend who looked after Lulu, our night owling tabby cat!

Gordon and Durward are eager to let all customers know that they only use the finest ingredients and they still use the old fashioned copper boilers to boil up their ingredients . The sweets are manufactured at the rear of the shop and you are able to watch some of the processes they use.

Scotland has always been famous for making `tablet`, it is an incredibly rich light mixture of condensed milk, sugar, vanilla and butter.
The light golden coloured butter tablet is quite unlike anything I have ever tasted before, you can only describe it as a block of crystallised sugar. When you break the slab it easily falls into pieces, it is crisp to the taste but at the very same time it is moist and sweet.

Tablet goes as far back as the 1800's, it would be all too easy to think of fudge and tablet and put them in the same category, but fudge is soft and creamy whereas tablet is brittle and has a definite grainy texture.

Gordon and Durward sell their vanilla butter tablet at £2.50 for 250g.
That may well seem a little on the expensive side but when you weigh up the cost of the rich ingredients and the fact that the tablet is home-made it justifies the price.

Although tablet is a sweet treat not even I feel inclined to overdo it, two or three squares is ample at any one time. If you went mad and ate the lot I think you may live to regret it!

But Gordon and Durward have a host of other sweets to offer, fudge, macaroons, nougat, chocolate coated ginger, date and marzipan, soft liquorice, chocolate filled liquorice and raspberry liquorice and some of my all time favourites even though I am well over the age of consent...the sugar mice!!

Because I buy some of the butter tablet to give as gifts I prefer to have it well presented and you can buy it all ready in smart red tartan boxes, the extra cost is minimal.
If by any chance you love boiled sweets ( or boilings as they are called in the shop!) then you must take some time to look at the huge selection of fantastic boiled sweets, all of the old favourites are there.

We maybe only pay a visit every couple of months, so the sweets are as much a treat for us as anyone. I know that they have a good website and that you can order any of their confectionery on-line.
At least if you feel like treating yourself then you could order a packet of Butter tablet to savour.
Rich, sweet, brittle and unique, that sums up the tablet quite well.

Summary: A very tasty treat from Crieff