Autumn, and sticky toffee apples, and fireworks. (Confectionery)

Member Name: Celandine

Product:	Confectionery
Date:	08/09/01 (9837 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lovely, autumnal, sticky, toffee

Disadvantages: err, calories, if you're worried, cleaning the pans, teeth, too.

It's that tail-end of the Summer, start of term feeling. However long I seem to be out of the education system I still get it - slight butterflies, and a sense of purpose, of preparing for winter, I suppose. Something to do with long hot days coming to an end, and getting big woolly jumpers out of cupboards. In other words, it's nearly, very nearly, Autumn - my favourite season. Autumn makes me really excited, you see. If I was Mog the Forgetful Cat, then I'd run around in the garden with a 'big fluffed up tail, smelling the smells', but I'm not a cat, and haven't a tail, but if I did have a tail, then it would be fluffed up.

One of the reasons it would be fluffed up is the smell of Autumn, of bonfires, and also of Autumn food. It's time to pack up the salads, and the quiches, and the ice-cream, and get into bowls of soup, and stews with dumplings, and make jam, and toffee. It's time for Blackberry and Apple crumble, and Elderberry wine. It isn't going to be that long until Halloween, and Bonfire night, which has to be my favorite festival.

And Bonfire night, whether that means hot tomato soup from styrofoam cups at a small village bonfire, or hotdogs eaten during a massive organised firework display-come-fair, also means toffee apples. And toffee apples mean toffee, and treacle toffee, which has to taste more autumny than any other sort of toffee - and so we come to the land of Autumn sweeties.

I'll start with a couple of recipes for treacle toffee, toffee apples, and one for toffee honeycomb, just for luck. I'll then get onto the dull stuff, like how to test for the correct point to take your boiling mixture off the boil, which is the only fiddly thing about making toffee, and toffee apples, come to that. The first recipe is for a proper, dark, sticky treacle toffee. It's so, so easy to make, and honestly tastes much nicer than the toffee you can buy in shops. The closest I've real
ly got to buying 'proper' treacle toffee is the stuff they sell in Thorntons. This home-made recipe makes toffee that is just as nice, and about half the price.

The only fiddly thing is washing out the pan afterwoods, and I tend to pour boiling water straight into the pan after toffee-making, which makes the washing up much easier. Oooh, and one other wonderful thing - the smell of the kitchen while you're making the toffee. It's wonderful - all autumnal, dark, rich, and sugary, like a proper, old-fashioned sweet shop. It also gives you an excuse to buy black treacle in the wonderful red and gold tins with the picture of the lion on the front.

So, here goes:

Treacle toffee

Ingredients:
10oz/275g Sugar
2 tablespoons of water
2 tablespoons of black treacle
2oz/50g butter
1 dessertspoon vinegar

To Make:
Put all the ingredients into a large saucepan, stir, and boil (hard boil, not simmer) for about 12-15 minutes, until a sugar thermometer shows 300 degrees F, or 149 degrees centigrade. If you like your toffee brittle, then boil for a slightly longer time. You can check it's ready when a small amount dropped in cold water forms a small ball (more on this in the dull bit, later on).

Then, take the mixture off the boil and carefully pour into a shallow greased tin about 20cm/8" square. As the toffee is setting, mark into squares with a knife that's been dipped in oil.

This makes about 120z/350g of toffee.

But, Treacle toffee is a bit too rich for toffee apples, so here's a recipe for these, and to make it a bit different, it's got Peanut butter in it, too:

Peanut Toffee Apples:

Ingredients:
6 medium sized eating apples
8oz granulated sugar
2oz peanut butter
6 skewers, or sticks (I use those wooden chopsticks that you buy in bulk, even if they are a bit long, really)

To Make:

Wash and dry th
e apples, and put the sticks firmly into the middle of them (really firmly, otherwise you might end up fishing around with a fork in the middle of a pan of boiling sugar for your lost apple. That, or your child will drop his/her apple in the road, and wail).

Butter a plate, or baking tray, ready to stand the apples on, and put this by your cooker. Have a bowl of cold water ready there, too.

Put the peanut butter and sugar into a big pan, over a low heat, and heat gently, stirring, until all the sugar has dissolved.

Bring to the boil, stirring all the time, and cook for three or four minutes, until the temperature on your sugar thermometer reads 138 degrees centigrade, 280 degrees F, or when a small spoonful of the mixture, if put in cold water, makes a slight 'crack' sound.

Now, straight away (if you dither, you'll be lost), dip the apples into the cold water, then straight into the toffee mixture. Then dip the apples into the cold water again (this stops the hot toffee running straight off the apples) and on to your buttered plate.

Leave to cool, and you've six peanut toffee apples. You can wrap them in cellophane if you want to be posh, but I use greaseproof paper, or just eat them straight away (not all of them, though - this is a good recipe if you're having a small party, or something like that).

Now, not everyone likes toffee. People with dentures, for example, can be wary of toffee. Small children can find toffee a bit gluey, especially if they like chattering, and find it stops them in their tracks. Some people just don't like toffee because they don't like toffee, which is fine by me. Some people are fudge, not toffee people - and fudge is dead easy to make too - it's even easier than toffee. But I'm on a toffee roll, so the last recipe is for Honeycomb - you know, the toffee that's in Crunchie bars, and is all airy, starting crunchy, and tongue numbingly sweet, t
hen melting to a gooey toffee stickiness in your mouth. Oooh, honeycomb. And once you've made it, you can dip it in chocolate if you want to.

Toffee Honeycomb:

Ingredients:
45ml/3tbsp clear honey
250g/9oz sugar
60ml/4tbsp water
25g/1oz butter
1tsp vinegar
1tsp bicarbonate of soda

To Make:

Put the honey, sugar, water, and butter into a large saucepan, then heat gently, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved.

Boil for about 2 minutes, covering the pan.

Uncover the pan, and boil for a further 5 minutes or so, until your sugar thermometer registers 300 degrees F/ 149 degrees centigrade, or, if a little of the mixture is dropped inot a up of cold water, it seperates into little brittle threads.

Remove the pan from heat, and stir in the bicarbonate of soda. The mixture, like magic, will rise in the pan (so you do need quite a big pan for this).

Pour into a small greased tin, and break up when cool.

It's lovely, this stuff - and then you can dip it in chocolate, if you like. Another plus side, is that it doesn't keep well, and gets sticky if you don't eat it on the same day. So you have to eat it all. What a shame.

So there's the three Autumn recipes - and I'm indebted to my Auntie Mary, and an out-of print book called "The Farmhouse Kitchen" (Audrey Ellis, published 1971 by Anchor Press) for them. They're pretty standard toffee recipes, I think, since toffee is one of the things you can't really play fast and loose with in terms of ingredients. If you want a basic toffee recipe, then look in practically any cookbook (Delia has a good one in her Complete Cookery course) and then, with basic recipes you can add nuts, or raisins, when the mixture has been taken off the boil.

With the recipes here, adding things doesn't really make them any better. They're best left alone - no tweaking, honestly. I've
tweaked, or tried to tweak, and it failed. I got sticky gloop with added nuts. It tasted fine, but it wasn't the sort of thing you can make as a present, and one of the beautiful things about home-made sweeties is that you can wrap them up in bits of greaseproof paper, and parcel them in brown paper that you, or your child, or both, has decorated, and have a lovely pressie, always assuming the reciever isn't either on a diet, or wears dentures.

I'll just mention the dull bit, quickly, which is that the time you take the terribly easy to make boiling mixture off the boil, is pretty crucial to your success in making toffee. It's a bit like Jam-making. You boil, not until you have a 'set', but until you've the right consistency of mixture for whatever you are making. If you want to make a syrup, you boil until the mixture is 110 degrees centigrade. If you want a brittle toffee, you boil until you get a 'hard crack' at 149 degrees centigrade. In between, you've 'soft crack', 'hard ball', firm ball', 'soft ball', and 'fudge'. Fudge is the lowest, and soft crack the toffee I'm talking about.

The easiest test for this is to use a sugar thermometer. If you do this sort of thing a lot (or make jam) then they're brilliant. Mine cost £3.75 from a hardware shop, but lakeland also sell them (although they're more expensive from there - at £5.99). It's easier to get a good result with sweets (as opposed to jam) if you don't have one, though. If you drop little teaspoons of mixture into cold water, after the mixture has boiled for the specified time, then you can usually see when to take it off the heat.

I've made toffee for years without a sugar thermometer. I haven't always got the 'crack' spot-on, but it's never been inedible. Fudge is a bit different - if you over-boil fudge then it gets hard and nasty. I'd say buy a thermometer if
you're going to make things like this more than twice a year, to be honest. But the dropping test works fine, since if you go slightly over or under, the resulting sweeties will just be a bit more sticky, or more brittle. This is where you can go fast and loose with the recipe, a bit, too. If you like your toffee's sticky, then don't boil them for so long. Stop at 'hard ball', and you'll have sticky toffee.

I like sticky toffee, myself. I make sticky treacle toffee in Autumn, just before Bonfire night, and when we all put on our woolly jumpers, and scarves, and go out in the dark to see the fireworks, we take some. It's better than tomato soup out of styrofoam cups, and much better than hot-dogs. It isn't better than fireworks, or bonfires though. It just tastes better when they're around.

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