The Daddifee

The Toffifee – like the After Eight and the Bendicks Mint it seems to be one of those sweets that only makes its appearance during the festive period, although if you’re lucky you may still see a few boxes sitting on the shelves of your local Poundstretcher during January.

Making a giant Toffifee ought to be easy: nougat and hazelnut in a toffee-caramel cup, topped off with a blob of chocolate, but like so many other ambitious pimping projects little did we know that upscaling the Toffifee to our version “The Daddifee” would cause problems leading to disaster.

The most important part of making the Daddifee was getting the caramel cup right. Working with liquid toffee is a tricky prospect. Toffee solidifies at a much higher temperature than chocolate and so shaping it is a challenge – most plastic moulds were out of the question as they would quickly melt. After much debate we decided on sandwiching the liquid toffee between two glass mixing bowls with the inner bowl raised on a small stand cut out of a tin can.

As the toffee set it would take on the shape of the narrow space between the bowls. After that it would be a simple matter of spooning in hazelnut chocolate (we used Nutella) and capping the all-conquering confection with a disc of cooking chocolate shaped in a baking tin.

In place of the Toffifee’s single hazelnut (and in the spirit of keeping everything to scale) we decided to have a cluster of around 30 hazelnuts stuck together with toffee. Finding blanched hazelnuts in the middle of Northumbria was impossible so we had to buy normal ones. Roasting them to remove the skin didn’t really work and we ended up peeling most of them.

Using a kitchen thermometer the toffee was heated to hard boiling temperature (120 degrees C) and poured into the outer bowl. A slightly smaller mixing bowl was then placed inside and pushed down, squeezing hot toffee into the gap, and was held in place until the toffee had set.

We were then faced with our first major challenge, separating the mould. Half an hour and several bent spoons later we managed to prise the bowls apart. Damage to the toffee cup was smoothed out by hand (like shaping clay on a potter’s wheel). Having cooled, the toffee shell was then put in a freezer for an hour to fully harden (we were under time pressure and so it seemed like a good idea).

THIS WAS A MISTAKE!

As soon as the shell was removed from the freezer it started to make loud cracking sounds as deep fissures appeared across its surface. We knew we had to move fast as the Daddifee’s gigantic glory was likely to be short-lived. I carefully flipped over the shell, placing the hazelnut cluster at the bottom, and began to fill it with Nutella.

By the time the crowning chocolate disc had been put in position the caramel shell had split. Twenty minutes later several other splits had appeared and the Nutella filling had oozed out onto the plate.

Anyone who attempted to eat the Daddifee was rapidly overwhelmed by the sweetness of the Nutella, toffee and chocolate. This soon turned into a craving for something incredibly savoury as an antidote – I tore through a packet of bacon-flavoured crisps which probably saved my life.

It was a difficult and ultimately disappointing snack-pimping debut for both of us, but we remain undeterred. See you sometime soon for another pimp!

Sean and Nicola

This is the recipe for the soft toffee

12 table spoons of sugar
8oz of butter
6 desert spoons of milk
6 desert spoons of golden syrup
1 teaspoon vinegar