Easy Chocolate Cinder Toffee Recipe | Kitchen Mason (2024)

FAQs

What's the difference between honeycomb and cinder toffee? ›

Honeycomb is a sweet confectionery also known as cinder toffee. Discover how to make honeycomb at home, how to store it and what to make with it.

Chewy honeycomb happens when the mixture hasn't been cooked for long enough. This is most common when you don't use a sugar thermometer. If you don't heat the mixture to 149°C the sugar won't achieve the brittleness required for that crumbly, crunchy texture.

This homemade honeycomb candy recipe results in a sweet confection crafted from airy, caramelized sugar and baking soda that is sure to delight and impress friends and coworkers!

Honeycomb toffee, honeycomb candy, sponge toffee, cinder toffee, seafoam, or hokey pokey is a sugary toffee with a light, rigid, sponge-like texture. Its main ingredients are typically brown sugar (or corn syrup, molasses or golden syrup) and baking soda, sometimes with an acid such as vinegar.

Heat too much and these aromas become bitter and the syrup burns. For making cinder toffee I like to be at around 150C as I like a brittle toffee with only a little bit of chew to it. However, if you want a more sticky toffee then heat to a lower temperature.

Stay vigilant when making the honeycomb – don't leave the pan of sugar syrup unattended and keep that heat on medium, too hot and it will catch, and you will end up with bitter caramel.

It's important while the toffee cooks to only stir it occasionally. Constant stirring can cause the toffee to crystallize and separate. For those of you that need to know exactly how often you should stir, I would suggest erring on the side of not stirring more than stirring.

Low and slow

Simmering the syrup for English toffee to the requisite 300°F temperature can (and should) be a slow process — up to 20 minutes or so. Don't hurry this gradual transformation; syrup that doesn't reach 300°F, or close to it, will make candy with timid flavor and chewy (not crunchy) texture.

Toffee Making Tips + Troubleshooting

Your toffee is better off overcooked than undercooked! Undercooked toffee won't be anything more than a caramel sauce. But overcooked toffee will be just slightly crunchier (almost unrecognizably). So, always err on the side of over-cooking!

You may mistake this for some kind of pest or disease but the real answer is very simple – it is just honey – crystallized honey in comb.

Why is honeycomb so expensive? ›

The production of wax comb is energy expensive for the bees. Estimates vary but bees need to eat approximately 6-8 pounds of honey to produce a pound of beeswax. So if you priced the bees work based on the number of calories consumed, honey plus wax costs a lot more than just honey.

Cinder toffee, also commonly known as honeycomb toffee, sponge toffee, or hokey pokey, is a light and crunchy confection with a distinctive honeycomb-like texture. It's a popular treat known for its aerated, spongy structure and rich, toffee-like flavour that's both sweet and slightly burnt.

By tossing the chocolate-coated cinder toffee pieces into some black caster sugar, they immediately become, to all intents and purposes, little pieces of sweet coal, and thus the embodiment of their name.

Regionally it may be referred to as sponge candy, sea foam, fairy food candy, or old fashioned puff in the US, and in Britain, it is often called Cinder Toffee with variances of puff candy in Scotland, Yellowman in Northern Ireland and Sponge Toffee in Canada.

Adding cream of tartar when you're making candy helps prevent the creation of sugar crystals. That's why lots of icing, syrup or candy recipes call for it: it makes it so the end product doesn't have large crunchy sugar capsules.

Cinder toffee, also commonly known as honeycomb toffee, sponge toffee, or hokey pokey, is a light and crunchy confection with a distinctive honeycomb-like texture. It's a popular treat known for its aerated, spongy structure and rich, toffee-like flavour that's both sweet and slightly burnt.

Honeycomb candy is known by many names.

Honeycomb toffee, sponge toffee, cinder toffee and hokey poke are just a few. Often though, it is simply referred to as honeycomb. The exact origin of this light yet rigid candy is disputed almost as much as the various names.

Honeycomb has a lot of different names: honeycomb toffee, sponge toffee, cinder toffee, hokey pokey, etc. They're all names to describe a candy that's made from combining brown sugar, corn syrup and baking soda.

Regionally it may be referred to as sponge candy, sea foam, fairy food candy, or old fashioned puff in the US, and in Britain, it is often called Cinder Toffee with variances of puff candy in Scotland, Yellowman in Northern Ireland and Sponge Toffee in Canada.