What is the biggest gobstopper ever made?

In Britain we call it a gobstopper, because it stops your gob. In Canada and the United States it is a jawbreaker, and that is the name Guinness World Records uses for the biggest one ever made.

The record

The largest jawbreaker on record weighed 12.6 kg and had a circumference of 94.6 cm, which makes it about 30 cm across: bigger than a football. It was made by Nick Calderaro, who worked for Oak Leaf Confections, at the company's headquarters in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. Work started on 7 January 2003 and finished on 29 May 2003, a total of 476 hours.

Weighed out the way we sell sweets, 12.6 kg would come to 126 scoops of 100 g.

Why it took nearly five months

Gobstoppers are not moulded in one go. They are built from the middle outwards, starting from a small core such as a pressed ball of sugar, a single anise seed or a gumball. The cores tumble in large, rotating, heated pans while liquid sugar is added again and again, with colours and flavours going in along the way. The trade calls this hot panning. An ordinary gobstopper takes several weeks, so a giant one takes a very long time indeed.

There is more on the method in how gobstoppers are made and what sugar panning is.

How big is a normal gobstopper?

Most are 1 to 3 cm across, though some have been sold as big as 83 mm. Either way, they dissolve very slowly, which is the whole point of them.

The Roald Dahl connection

Gobstoppers were a favourite of British schoolboys in the first half of the twentieth century. Roald Dahl wrote about a jar of gobstoppers in a prank he played on his local sweet shop owner in 1924, and later invented the Everlasting Gobstopper for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, published in 1964: a gobstopper that never gets any smaller. Real ones do get smaller, just very slowly.

For another sweet giant, see the longest stick of rock, made in Blackpool.

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