When reality doesn’t live up to expectations

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A couple of weeks ago, friends came to visit. And they brought a small gift – a box of toffees. I’m not a great eater of sweets and the girls are not that fond of toffee either but we do often take some sort of sweets on long car journeys, and my partner does particularly like treacle. So when we set off on a longish drive last week I picked up the box of toffees thinking this would make a nice little treat, especially for the driver. And after half an hour or so I opened the box, anticipating squares of blackish toffee. Instead I found a bag containing an amorphous mass of caramel! When our friends visited it was a very hot day, so I guess the toffee must have melted in their car and then cooled into this shapeless lump. It was too hard to easily rip a piece off but not hard and brittle enough to shatter with a hammer. I did manage to carve a small chunk off the corner with a pen knife, but was even more surprised to find that it wasn’t even treacle toffee. It was just chewy sweetish stuff. Obviously our friends couldn’t have known what was in the box but I think the packaging was very misleading. The ‘toffee’ isn’t really worth the effort (and damage to teeth) of eating it, I think it will have to go into the food waste collection unless I can think of a way of melting it and using it in a cake recipe or something! On the other hand it is making me fancy some real old-fashioned treacle toffee now, like my mother used to make… All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2025.