Honeycomb
An old fashioned sweet recipe, often called cinder toffee, homemade honeycomb always tastes best. The melt in the mouth recipe is simple to make, too.
Introduction
Also known as ‘cinder toffee’, this old-time favourite sweet is delicious on its own, or it can be covered with melted chocolate or crumbled over ice cream and other creamy desserts. This recipe makes a very thick honeycomb, but if you prefer a thinner one you can halve the quantities. Adding bicarbonate of soda to the boiled sugar creates thousands of air bubbles just as the sugar is solidifying. The texture becomes brittle rather than hard so the honeycomb literally melts in your mouth.
Ingredients
| 100g | unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing |
| 2 tbsp | white wine vinegar |
| 300ml | golden syrup |
| 400g | caster sugar |
| 2 tsp | bicarbonate of soda, sifted |
Essential kit
You will need 1 x 20cm square cake tin.
Method
Butter your baking tin. Line the tin with a sheet of baking paper so that each end of the paper comes up the sides of the tin (this makes it easier to remove the cooked honeycomb later).
Melt the butter in a very large, heavy-bottomed saucepan (be careful as the mixture will bubble up considerably) over a low heat. Then add the vinegar, golden syrup and caster sugar. Let the sugars melt into the butter, then turn the heat up to medium but do not stir. Heat the syrup until it reaches the hard-ball stage (test by dropping a teaspoonful into a bowl of cold water and it should harden).
Remove the pan from the heat and immediately stir in the bicarbonate of soda. As the mixture begins to bubble up, gently stir it to mix in the soda (don’t mix too vigorously). Pour the mixture into your prepared cake tin and leave it to cool. When it begins to set, score the toffee with a knife into bite-sized pieces. When completely cooled it can be broken into pieces along the scores and stored in an airtight container for up to a week.
Prep time 25 min
Setting time 2 hours
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