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Home-made tablet
Sugar. Condensed milk. Butter. Simple, right? What can possibly go wrong?
Plenty.
Butter tablet is tricky, temperamental stuff. Make one easy, well-behaved, gently-caramelising batch, and you're almost certain to follow it with a bubbling mass of volcanically ill-tempered lava desperate to turn soot-black if you dare to turn your back for even a second.
Even once you're over the cooking stage and you have the colour and consistency you want, you're not out of danger. You may have tamed your tablet ... now it has to be beaten.
The beating stage is, according to tablet lore, the trickiest of all. Beat it too hard and you'll end up with a rock-hard substance more suitable for constructing car parks than providing a tasty treat. Go too easy on it and the sugar won't crystalise, the tablet won't set properly and you'll be left with a tray full of useless, sweet mush.
Big companies take a lot of short cuts to avoid all these pitfalls, but the end result doesn't justify those cut corners. Unless you take your time and do things right, you just don't get the richness of flavour or the subtlety of texture every Scot would instantly recognise as home-made tablet.
I've lost a few batches or, more accurately, given them up or abandoned them. I've tried to rush things, tried to find a faster, easier, less involved route.
It doesn't exist. Slow and steady, checking everything, responding to the 'personality' of each and every batch on its own merits, is the only way. It takes time, but it's worth it.
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