Snow White's Poisoned Candy Apples

Happy Halloween my pretties!! I hope you have a spooktacular Friday! :)

There are loads of toffee apple recipes floating around but having made some dud ones, allow me to show you how to make beautiful, glossy toffee apples. To get that other worldly sheen, you need liquid glucose. I made a batch with and without it and using the liquid glucose gave it a beautiful sheen whereas the other ones were a little lumpy. These were inspired by the ones found here. For another idea you can perhaps spear the apple using a faux twig (or a real one, can one get sick from that?).

So that I can get my Halloween recipes up in time, I usually hold my Halloween party a week or two ahead of the 31st of October. But my behaviour this year wasn't quite normal. You see I'd developed a throat infection and this combined with pollen allergies had moved to my ears and blocked my left eustachian tube. As a result I was walking around like I was tipsy and unbalanced the whole time. I'm pretty sure I resembled a drunk witch elf.

"Woaaah! Who moved the floor? Where am I?" I'd say if I moved too fast feeling at last what it would be like if I were Lucille Austero from Arrested Development. If I lay on the bed, it spun and I received the effects of taking drugs without any actual drugs.

I went to the doctor to see if it was more serious. He was a great doctor who surprised me by telling me that he reads the blog along with his wife! He asked if we could take some photos and then he got down to the business of diagnosing me. He knew exactly what was going on with my head spins and he prescribed some sinus clearing medicine and then advised me to chew gum.

I have to admit that I don't like chewing gum. Mainly because gum tastes great for about five seconds and then becomes metallic and very unpalatable. So I took up chewing. Chewing big chunky things like apples before I realised that I could inject some fun by making them not just toffee apples but black toffee apples for Halloween!

Any Dear Ghouls! I hope you have a wonderfully gothic Halloween and tell me, will you be celebrating Halloween this year at all?

Snow White's Poisoned Candy Apples

An Original Recipe by Not Quite Nigella

Makes a dozen "poisoned" toffee apples

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Cooking time: 25 minutes

• 4 cups sugar
• 1.5 cups water
• 1/2 cup liquid glucose
• Black food colouring gel
• 12 Granny Smith apples
• 6 pairs chopsticks tinted with a couple of teaspoons green food dye mixed with water

Step 1 - Line a large tray with parchment and grease the paper. Wash the apples well, some have a waxy coating. Dry and place a chopstick in the top of the apple.

Step 2 - Place the sugar, water and liquid glucose in a saucepan and clip a sugar thermometer to the side of the pan. Bring to a boil, no need to stir the sugar at all, just bring it to a boil and cook until it reaches the hard crack stage at 150C/302F. When it gets to soft crack, add a little of the black food colouring.

Warning! If you photograph these, make sure that you look presentable because they're like a mirror. Remember the nude guy in the ebay kettle auction photo - NSFW?

Step 3 - When it has reached the temperature, remove from the heat and quickly but carefully dip the apples in the toffee allowing excess toffee to drip off. Rest on the prepared parchment. I also attached little "wishes" that I printed out. These are best made on the day of serving if the weather is warm and humid.

Cleaning tip: soak the pan in hot water, the toffee will dissolve.