Today, December 19th, is National Hard Candy Day.

Hard candies are a type of sweet or candy that are also known as boiled sweets.

It is made by boiling syrup, which could be made from sucrose, fructose or glucose, all types of sugar, to 160°C and then cooling it. As the boiled syrup reaches room temperature it becomes stiff and brittle.

The sugar syrup is not merely boiled and allowed to cool though. After boiling it flavourings and colourings would then be added. The resulting mixture could be made into individual confections and, before it fully cools, be moulded, folded or rolled into other shapes, such as the traditional British seaside confection rock.

Image: By Adam Zivner (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons