There are many ways to make a Toffee Apple

There are several steps to producing excellent toffee apples (by the hundreds) apart from the manufacture of the toffee itself. The collection of at least 5 boxes of apples (about 800 apples) from…. The shop across the road, since we didn’t have a car, it was always the easiest arrangement. I had also spent some time there after school, packing groceries for delivery, when I was older. He charged a little more than the vegetable shop we usually shopped at, but not having a car, at least we could carry them across the road to home. Once home, they had to be sorted. Any severely bruised or holey apples would have to be put aside. You certainly couldn’t sell a toffee apple with a worm preserved inside it? Or could you. ‘Toffee apple surprise’ maybe? So they were sorted. Then one or two of use were assigned the task of washing the apples. This was to ensure we would wash of any potential sprays, bugs or harmful bird droppings as sometimes occurred. The washing was just in water, but you couldn’t rub the apples too hard or you would bruise them. Due to the large number of apples we had to prepare one box at a time and repack ready for stage two.

Once again we introduce a painful experience in helping the church (or school). What is it with religion and suffering? What is it that all toffee apples have? Don’t say toffee, that’s a given. That’s right, another devious device, probably used by the Dominican priests of the Spanish Inquisition to inflict suffering on the unholy. I am talking about the stick! The simple sharp pointy ended stick. Each and every toffee apple needed one and, no doubt as would have happened to some ‘heathens’ and those being investigated, each and every one would be impaled, only as far as the centre of the core. We became fairly skilled at naturally measuring and impaling to the centre of the apple, without going all the way through. You had too. Too far and you impaled your hand. Lesson learned more than once. Too short, and the apple would fall off in the toffee dipping stage. That was not a popular moment for the person manipulating the bubbling pot of hot toffee. And you would soon hear about it as blame would quickly be apportioned to the responsible party if this occurred.

Lets face it, you took the pointy stick and pushed it into the apple and sat it back in another box to await its liquid toffee covering. End of phase two. Over time, the cost of the wooden pointy stick meant we were forced to change to the cheaper flat wooden ice-block stick. The shorter, flatter (and far more prone to snap in half if your impaling was a little off-centre) ice block or ice lolly stick, depending on your heritage. Many times we were forced to lift sharp splinters of snapped wooden sticks from our hands and massage the centre of the palm which rapidly became very sore and bruised from pushing in the several hundred impalings. The Dominicans would have been proud of our impaling statistics.

(continued tomorrow)