Homemade lollies

Today I became better acquainted with my kitchen with a few sets of baking...and washing dishes...and baking...and washing dishes. I made peanut butter biscuits (an easy favourite, but they took way longer without Aaron to roll the dough into balls for me), carrot cake (took longer without Caleb's help who almost makes the whole cake, just with a little supervision), and then when the boys came home from school Caleb told me about a science experiment they did with sugar, syrup and baking soda...yip, good old honeycomb, aka cinder, aka hokey pokey. I wrongly assumed he wanted to try it at home, so after googling a proper recipe (Caleb kept changing the quantities of ingredients each time he retold it), we set to. Turns out Caleb wasn't really keen on a remake and doesn't like the stuff at all, so there was a bit of coercion on my part to get him to stick around and stir the pot. It has a strong aftertaste from the soda, but the sweet melt-awayness during eating makes it worthwhile! The recipe is as follows, from here:

4 tablespoons golden syrup
1 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon bicarbonate of soda

- Line a baking tray with baking paper.
- In a large saucepan, heat the golden syrup and sugar together, bring to a boil then simmer on low heat for 5-10 minutes. Cooking time will vary but test it by dropping a little syrup into water - it should become brittle when ready. Watch it doesn't burn.
- Remove pot from heat and add the bicarb soda. Quickly mix it in because the mixture will foam up instantly.
- Pour immediately into the cake tin.
- Leave to set then break into bite size chunks.