{
    "id": 1070801,
    "title": "How is Kendal Mint Cake made?",
    "slug": "how-is-kendal-mint-cake-made",
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    "url": "https://sweeties.net/wiki/how-is-kendal-mint-cake-made/",
    "modified": "2026-09-26T13:07:06+01:00",
    "excerpt": "Kendal Mint Cake is sugar, glucose, water and peppermint oil boiled in copper pans and stirred so it crystallises, then poured into moulds and broken into bars.",
    "content_text": "Kendal Mint Cake is a peppermint flavoured sugar bar from Kendal in Cumbria: see Kendal Mint Cake. It is made from four simple ingredients: sugar, glucose, water and peppermint oil. The makers keep their exact recipes and methods secret, but the basic process is known.\nThe method\nBoil. The sugar, glucose, water and peppermint oil are boiled together in a copper pan.Stir. The mixture is stirred continuously as it cooks.Pour. It is poured by hand into moulds. In its history of mint cake, Kendal's Stricklandgate House Trust says the skill lies with the sugar boiler, who has to know the right moment to pour.Set and break. Once it has set, it is broken into individual bars.\nWhy stirring turns it white\nSugar sweets fall into two families. Crystalline sweets, such as fudge and fondant, get their texture from tiny sugar crystals, which makes them easy to bite or cut into. Clear boiled sweets have a disorganised structure with no crystals at all, and are hard and glassy. Stirring pushes a sugar syrup towards the first family: some of the earliest fudge recipes were stirred all the time, and the fudge came out crumbly because the syrup crystallised. Mint cake is stirred continuously, and without that stirring the result would be clear: see how is fondant made?\nThe Trust describes the result as a blend of textures, half solid and half granular, that tastes creamy when eaten. Romney's says the first bite of its mint cake is firm, but it quickly goes soft and melts in the mouth.\nBorn from a batch that went wrong\nThe same chemistry sits behind the origin story. In 1869 Joseph Wiper, who married into the Thompson family of Kendal confectioners, is supposed to have left a boiled solution for glacier mints overnight, only to find in the morning that it had turned cloudy and set solid. Glacier mints are the clear kind: see Fox's Glacier Mints. Romney's, which bought Wiper's in 1987, says it still makes mint cake to Wiper's original recipe.\nWhite, brown and chocolate\nMint cake made with white sugar, mint cake made with brown sugar, and mint cake covered in chocolate are the main kinds. Romney's covers its white mint cake in Belgian dark chocolate. It gives its white and brown mint cake as 379 kcal per 100 g, and the chocolate covered bar as 402 kcal per 100 g, and its bars carry a best before date of 12 months.\nFuel for explorers\nMint cake is almost pure sugar, which is why it has long been carried as energy food. Wiper's Kendal Mint Cake went with Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition of 1914 to 1917, and Romney's went up Everest with Edmund Hillary's team in 1953: see the sweet that went up Everest. For the odd name, see why is Kendal Mint Cake called a cake?",
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