An easy dish of just 4 ingredients, but seriously impressive.
The chocolate coating is optional but recommended. Not only do the flavours work amazingly well together, but the coating allows you to keep the honeycomb fresh for a week or longer. Whereas without the chocolate it will start to go soft within a day or two.
Full recipe below video
For a 20cm x 20 cm tray.
300g sugar
1 tablespoon honey
80ml water
5g / 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
200g chocolate.
- Most importantly when making honeycomb: caramel boils at very high temperatures and it's also sticky. So don't get any on you!
- Line your baking tray with parchment paper.
- Mix the honey, water and sugar, so that there aren't any dry sugar crystals left. Brush the edges of the pan with water to remove any sugar that's stuck to the sides.
- Bring the sugar mixture to a simmer slowly. You want all of the sugar dissolved and the mixture to be clear before it hits the boil.
- Now boil it rapidly and brush down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush again.
- You're aiming for a very pale caramel colour, more yellow than golden. As soon as the caramel reaches this stage, turn off the heat, tip in your bicarbonate of soda and whisk briskly (but carefully!) for about 5 seconds.
- Immediately tip the mixture into your pre-lined baking tray and allow to cool for an hour or two.
- Your honeycomb will now be hard and crunchy. Smash it up however you see fit.
- If coating in chocolate: Gently melt the chocolate in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Make sure the bottom of the bowl isn't touching the water - you just want the steam.
- If you wish to temper your chocolate so that it returns to being hard and snappy when it cools follow the instruction below. Otherwise, just toss your honeycomb in the melted chocolate and leave to cool at room temperature (don't put in the fridge - it'll ruin it).
- Tempering chocolate is a way of manipulating its crystal structure so that when it resets, it returns to being hard and snappy, as it was when you brought it from the shop; rather than the soft bendy stuff you often get after melting and resetting.
Getting the perfectly shiny finish of professional chocolatiers is tricky, but just making sure your chocolate resets nicely is easy. All you need is a temperature probe.
- Reserve a few chunks of chocolate and finely chop.
- Melt the rest and bring the temperature to 50c
- allow to cool to 38c while stirring occasionally. Takes about 10 minutes.
- Add the reserved chocolate and stir until melted and the mixture has cooled to 32c. It's now ready to use.
- Occasionally return the bowl of chocolate to the simmering water if the temperature drops below 32c.
- That's it.