Making sweets

Last weekend I decided to have a try at making some sweets. I asked some friends if they wanted to come and help me. We decided to make fudge, honeycomb and coconut ice. We started with fudge. We looked at the recipes and found that we had all the necessary ingredients. This is always a bonus when you are going to make something.

Basically for fudge we had to put all the ingredients in a pan, boil it at a certain temperature and put it in a tin in the fridge. So we put all the ingredients on the pan and put it on the hob. We turned the hob on (if we hadn't turned it on there would've been no heat, and it wouldn't have boiled.) It took ages to come to the boil. When it did come to the boil it decided to boil and boil. Due to the silliness of an electric hob, 3 meant it didn't boil, 4 meant it over boiled, so i had to keep raising it off the hob and putting it back on. It wouldn't quite come up to temperature so we thought maybe it wasn't going to. The next step was to take it off the heat and beat it. We did this. At this point it was meant to turn a lovely fudgy colour. It didn't. We put it in the fridge anyway as thought that might do it some good. It didn't. So I thought well this really isn't fudge. So tried to heat it again. Unfortunately this did no good. It remained a wrong colour, texture and firmness. I now have some semi-fudge sat in a tin in my kitchen that I don't know what to do with. I can't put it down the sink as it's too thick, I can't put it in the bin coz it's too runny. With substances that are too thick for the sink and too runny for the bin I would normally put them down the toilet. But I am worried that the non-fudge may sit at the bottom of the pan and not flush away.

So fudge a disaster, move onto honeycomb. From the recipe looks like there is no way this can go wrong. This is another put the all the ingredients in the pan and heat recipe. So we put them in, and put them on the hob (and turn it on). We have to stir until the sugar dissolves, then not stir until it boils and changes colour. We dutifully do this. Next step, take it off the heat and stir in bicarbonate of soda. This we do. It is meant to bubble up. This does not happen. We put it on the baking sheet anyway, thinking that doing this may do something magical. It doesn't. We end up with some toffee like substance that is not very edible, and that is stuck to the baking parchment.

After this I wash up, as we are running out of cooking equipment and surface space.

Right so coconut ice. We get the required ingredients out. Put the condensed milk in the bowl. Stir in the icing sugar. Add the coconut, This is hard to stir in. Put half of it in the tin. Add some strawberry flavouring (which contains some red colouring.) Put this in tin also. Refrigerate.

While it is in the fridge I phone my father as he had just got back from Spain and was about to go to America (alright for some!) When on the phone the people I am cooking with tidy the kitchen a bit. In the process of tidying they find that instead of using bicarbonate of soda in the honeycomb we had used baking soda. This would explain the failure. We decided to try honeycomb again, this time with a different recipe and the right ingredients. We put the ingredients in the pan, put it on the turned on hob, stirred until the sugar melted, then didn't stir until it reached the required temperature as specified by the new recipe. We then took it off the heat, added vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, it fizzed up a little. We felt good about this. We put it in the tin lined with greased baking parchment. When it cooled, it had turned into honeycomb flavoured toffee. Not at all as it was meant to be, and not exactly tasty.

The coconut ice was nice.