Tablet

Tonight we’re going to a Burn’s Night party at a friend’s house, it’s become an annual tradition (much like Burn’s Night itself funnily enough!) and is always a lot of fun. There is of course haggis, neeps and tatties but there is also a performance element to the evening which everyone is encouraged to get involved in. Neither Stephen nor I are particularly talented in the traditional areas of singing, dancing or instrument playing and in previous years we’ve tried to remain as invisible as possible during this part of the evening. This year however we decided to be brave and rather than subjecting our fellow guests to a karaoke version of Scottish pop music, we thought we could take a dish along and talk about it; we chose tablet.

We researched a number of recipes but become increasingly apprehensive about our choice of dish, it seems tablet can be rather troublesome and unpredictable. Neither of us have eaten it before so we had the added disadvantage of not really knowing what we were trying to create. We’d made a decision though so we stuck to it and last night we set about boiling vast amounts of sugar with butter and condensed milk.

Once the sugary mixture had thickened we followed the instructions to whisk vigorously until we felt the mixture become grainy. We continued to mix for some time but weren’t entirely convinced we’d got to the grainy stage. We carried on as long as our mixing arms would allow before tipping the mixture into a greased baking tray and leaving it to cool.

This morning we cut the tablet into generous sized pieces and have packaged it up ready to take along with us this evening. We have of course tasted the crumbs and while we think it’s good, neither of us are sure whether we’ve come up with tablet or fudge. I guess we’ll find out this evening.