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Sunday, 30 September 2007Pleased to meet youWe had a great day in Stirling yesterday at the International Market, and it was a pleasure to meet so many new customers.We took along most of our flavours, all of which sold extremely well. Our Amaretto and Irish Cream sold out in record time, and the traditional vanilla tablet also did very well. Being an international market, the event attracted a lot of tourists and visitors from all over the world, so we were able to let people from as far afield as the USA and Japan join the Fablet fan club. So if anyone who picked up some Fablet at the market has followed the website link on our packaging, thank you for supporting us - and we look forward to seeing you again soon. We'll be out and about next week, too - watch this space for more details of where you can see us next Saturday! Monday, 24 September 2007Home-made tabletSugar. 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. Wednesday, 19 September 2007In search of perfectionIt's a cool, crisp September morning and I've spent my time shuttling between the kitchen and the office, cooking up a few new batches of vanilla Fablet, tinkering with the website and trying to make sure both are every bit as good as they should be.Attention to detail's the key for both. You could say I'm a sweetie fan. I just love anything sugary, chocolatey and sweet. I've been eating tablet for as long as I can remember. I've tried great tablet. I've tried some pretty bland tablet. And I've tried some frankly terrible tablet, too. Almost without exception the great ones were home-made. That's partly because of the ingredients - a lot of big companies use fondant as a short-cut, because it's easier to handle in factory quantities, but it doesn't give you that crumbly, crystalised sugar texture that's so crucial to the tablet experience. It's also about the personal touch a big organisation can't bring. I'm in a position to see, straight away, when something's not quite right. And then I can fix it, refine the recipe, or go back to scratch and make things even better. If it's not the best, why bother doing it at all? Doing everything by hand is the only way to get it right. I wouldn't want to eat some churned-out, bland, tasteless tablet - and I certainly wouldn't want my customers to do that either. Because sweets are important, and it's just as important that every aspect of the Fablet business takes that into account. A shoddy, scrappy, badly-written website wouldn't communicate the passion I have for my sweets. Nothing less than exceptional leaves our front door, and nothing less than every-dot-comma-and-hyphen-in-the-right-place perfection will do for the website, either. It's my window on a wider world, and I want everyone to see the lovely things I've been making. If you think there's anything I can do to improve anything, make things clearer or add any additional features or information, do get in touch. It's a labour of love, this Fablet thing. Monday, 10 September 2007Getting StartedWelcome to the Fablet Blog!Here, I'll be keeping you up to date with everything that's happening in the wonderful world of gourmet tablet. You'll find out what's been cooking in the Fablet kitchen, what new tastes I've been experimenting with ... and how much of the end product is left after what we politely call 'the taste test'... Stay tuned! |
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