# Bonfire Night sweets

**Canonical URL:** https://sweeties.net/wiki/bonfire-night-sweets/
**Source:** sweeties.net, online pick and mix sweet shop

## Summary

Bonfire Night sweets: toffee apples, bonfire toffee, also called Plot toffee or claggum, and parkin. Where they came from, and how to make them safely.

## Description

Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Night, falls on 5 November. It began with the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when a group of English Catholics tried to kill King James I, and the following January Parliament passed an act, known as the Thanksgiving Act, to mark the day. Bonfires and fireworks have marked it since, and the night has its own sweets.
Toffee apples
Toffee apples, called candy apples in America, are whole apples on a stick, coated in hard sugar. They belong to the autumn festivals that come just after the apple harvest. In the UK they are eaten on Bonfire Night in England, Scotland and Wales, and at Halloween in Scotland and Northern Ireland: see toffee apples and how to make toffee apples
Bonfire toffee
Bonfire toffee is a hard, brittle toffee that tastes strongly of black treacle. It has many names: treacle toffee, Plot toffee and Tom Trot, claggum in Scotland, with less sweet versions called clack, and loshin du in Wales. Treacle was first used in Britain in the 1660s, to make gingerbread, and bonfire toffee followed, though nobody is sure why it became a Bonfire Night sweet. From about 1830 to 1900 it was popular in Yorkshire, and it was usually made at home: see treacle toffee
Parkin
Parkin is a gingerbread cake made with oatmeal and black treacle, from Northern England, and it is traditionally eaten on Guy Fawkes Night. The first dated record of it comes from 1728, from the West Riding of Yorkshire Quarter Sessions, when a woman called Anne Whittaker was accused of stealing oatmeal to make parkin. In Lancashire it is usually made with golden syrup instead of treacle.
Making them safely
Toffee and toffee apples are made by boiling sugar to the hard crack stage, around 150°C, far hotter than boiling water. Hot sugar sticks to skin and burns badly, so keep children well back from the pan: see how is toffee made? Hard toffee is also a hard sweet, so take care with small children: see hard sweets and younger children
In our pick and mix
For toffee on Bonfire Night, we sell SW046 and SW047 by the 100 g. Recipes differ between makers, so each card opens up to show the full ingredients and allergens for the sweets we actually stock.

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