Thursday 23 October 2008

WhyNotSmile Holiday - The Post Script

Those of you who followed the WhyNotSmile holiday in Belfast will remember that there was one location left to visit - Aunt Sandra's Candy Factory. Since it's right beside my dentist's surgery, and since I had a dental appointment yesterday, and since the appointment was fine and my teeth are in good shape, I decided to pay the factory a visit straight afterwards.

Unfortunately, lack of foresight meant that I didn't have working batteries in my camera, so I'm afraid I've no photo of the place, but if you watch this, you'll get a little tour (it's somewhere in the middle of the clip).

Anyway, if you have kids, they would love this place - not only does it have jars and jars of old-style sweets (the likes of cinnamon lozenges, clove rock, strawberry sherbet etc) but you can watch them making the sweets as well. In fact, for the very keen, you can book a tour in advance, although you have to pay for that. But there's no charge for having a duke through the window, so I spent a happy few moments watching them make candy apples (bit of a dull time of year to visit, to be honest, 'cos it's not like I'd never seen candy apples being made before, but hey).

Of course, I had to buy a souvenir of my visit, so I went for Aunt Sandra's Puff Candy (honeycomb in chocolate, basically, like Crunchies only in wee bits). This is the bag of Puff Candy:
and inside they look like this:
They were exceptionally nice, so much so that I ate about 3/4 of the packet in one sitting and got such a sugar rush that I had to go for a long walk to burn off the energy.

If you fancy visiting, it's the bright pink building on the Castlereagh Road.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The tour is worth doing. They make boiled cola type sweets, taking you through the process from start to finish and giving you a bag to take home. (You also get a go at making candy floss)

Also, if you are the only party in the tour without children (as we were) they let you do the tour at the child rate (because you don't get a chance to win the 'free' prizes that the children get)