Ingredients
9 oz sweetened condensed milk
9 oz icing sugar, sifted, plus extra for dusting
8 oz desiccated coconut
pink food colouring

Method
Mix together the condensed milk and icing sugar in a large
bowl until very stiff. Add coconut. It will not want to go.
Make it. Use your hands. If you wear rings, take them off at
this point.

Split the mix into two and knead a very small amount of
food colouring into one half. Dust a board with icing sugar,
then shape each half into a smooth rectangle and place one
on top of the other. Roll with a rolling pin, reshaping with
your hands every couple of rolls, until you have a rectangle
of two-tone coconut ice about 1 inch thick.

Transfer to a plate and leave for at least 4 hrs or ideally
overnight to set. This will keep for up to a month at least, if
stored properly. If your coconut ice lasts for a month, you
are not making it correctly.

Spread the peanuts in a single layer on a buttered oven tray.
Put the other ingredients in a saucepan and start to heat very
slowly, stirring all the while. When the sugar has dissolved,
increase the heat a little and stir more vigorously until a
caramel is formed. When it reaches the correct colour,
according to taste, take it off the heat, pour it over the
peanuts and leave to cool.

Her name was Mrs McCreadie. Do you remember the name of the lady who ran your sweetshop? They tended to come in two flavours: nice and rounded, or grumpy kid-haters you couldn’t believe ever chose this line of work, complaining about sticky coins and glaring at you if you looked like you might touch anything.

Mrs McCreadie was in the first group, always ready with a smile and a gentle hand on the scales that would round up your ten or twenty pence-worth, not down. It was such a treat to go in there, marvelling at the colours and the choices, the big ten-pence piece growing hot and grubby in your tightly clenched fist as you weighed up your options – long-lasters or delicious melt-in-the-mouth? Expensive chocolate or cheap chews?

Then, with the fashion for things retro and handmade, they started to return. When an old-fashioned sweetshop opened just up from where we were staying in London a year or so ago, my husband and I were very excited about it and took the children up there and, in the manner of Willy Wonka, said, ‘Ta dah! And you can choose anything you like!’

Our poor children, brought up on the absolute nonsense that passes for sweets where we live in France – small hard jellies, horrible chews that you can’t get the paper off – and the nasty salt liquorice my husband gets sent from his homeland of New Zealand, just gazed around, confused, completely unaware of the treasure store that surrounded them. Flumps, jelly beans, cola cubes – black and red – humbugs, sherbets, toffees, caramels, nougats, rocks and eclairs stretched up to the ceiling as far as they could see. Our eldest, aged five, looked around, slightly panicked, for a long time then, very quietly, pointed at a plain liquorice pole and said, ‘I’ll have that please,’ whereupon the three-year-old, whose sole aim in life is to replicate, as far as possible, every detail of the existence of his elder sibling, went ‘Me too, Ah wan that,’ and my husband and
I looked at each other, shrugged, bought them the liquorice then splurged on half the rest of the shop and guzzled it walking up the road in a way that couldn’t possibly have imparted any meaningful life lessons.

And every penny chew, every Black Jack, every Highland Toffee (yes, I was raised in Scotland) is a direct path, a running track to childhood, comfort, sweetness and sharing, or not. I remember, once I hit my grim secondary school, the anticipation of sharing a Twix with Gillian Pringle while hiding from the horrible kids on the back stairs was about the only thing that could get me through the day. I haven’t eaten a Twix since.

By contrast, when I got a little older, about to leave school and go off to college, and getting invited to parties and beginning to feel freer and happier, I went through a period of basically existing off creme eggs (and staying a size 10, back when a size 10 really was a size 10. And teenagers think they’ve got it tough!). I do still love a creme egg.

I remember the excitement when my first American friend was sent three huge bags of Hershey’s Kisses, which we binged upon, the little silver sweetheart wrappers littering our chilly dark dorm in Edinburgh. I thought Hershey’s Kisses were just about the most sophisticated things I could imagine. And I can measure my first trip to America in the flaking of Butterfingers and melting into Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on the everlasting Greyhound bus.

And now? Now I have moved to a country that has almost no interest in sweets at all, otherwise they wouldn’t wrap them like they do (in cheap paper that sticks to the surface, so you invariably get a mouthful of candy flecked with wrapping). France, where I live for my husband’s work, is the country of patisserie; of cakes that float like air; of pastries and millefeuille and macaroons and schoolchildren who, when I make a tray of tablet for ‘tastes of the world’ day, gather round to tell me solemnly that it is ‘trop sucré ’, a fact that is hard to argue with, given a recipe starting, ‘Take one kilo of sugar . . .’

But I do miss them. Chocolate limes – what a perfect combination of flavours that is. I can eat Edinburgh rock till I’ve burned off the roof of my mouth. My plan, before I get really old and have to start worrying about pulling out one of my teeth, is to eat as much toffee as I can. If I ate as much fudge as I could, they would have to take me to hospital in one of those re - inforced animal ambulances. After knocking down a wall. My grandmother, and this is true, ate nothing but sweets from the day she retired, as a staple diet. And she reached a ripe old age.

So this book is a way of channelling my affections, really. It is my homage to the sweetshop; to Star Bars and Spangles and Refreshers and liquorice allsorts and gobstoppers and Hubba Bubba and Saturday mornings and playtime and friendship, and all the Mrs McCreadies of this world; to all those who are kind to nervous children when they have only pennies to spend. And I’ve included (because, I’m afraid, I just can’t help myself) some of my favourite recipes, for toffee, and tablet, and Turkish delight, and other little treats. The smell of syrup gently thickening in the kitchen on a chilly afternoon is my idea of heaven. I have been reminded to warn everyone, even though obviously you already know, to take care, especially if you’re cooking with children, because boiling sugar is very very very hot. There you go: I have fulfilled my health and safety commitments!

Anyway, in the manner of a wine waiter at a fancy restaurant, I consider this book best enjoyed with a large bag (paper, ideally a pink and green faded stripe with a serrated edge) of sherbet lemons, and an epically large mug of tea. Then brush your teeth!

With very warmest wishes,

Jenny

Rosie Hopkins thinks leaving her busy London life, and her boyfriend Gerard, to sort out her elderly Aunt Lilian’s sweetshop in a small country village is going to be dull. Boy, is she wrong.

Lilian Hopkins has spent her life running Lipton’s sweetshop, through wartime and family feuds. As she struggles with the idea that it might finally be time to settle up, she also wrestles with the secret history hidden behind the jars of beautifully coloured sweets.

Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams – a novel – with recipes.

Read the introduction from Jenny

Exciting news 1) Little, Brown, my publishers have asked for a follow up to Meet Me at the Cupcake Cafe! Hurrah. It will be called Christmas at the Cupcake Cafe (hmm, can you guess what it’s about?) and it will be out late next year for Christmas 2012, and I absolutely cannot wait to get started on it.

Exciting news 2) is that next year’s book, Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams is all finished and ready and the cover is gorgeous and early feedback is very flattering so that is exciting too. It’s out at the end of March. Hurrah! It’s about Rosie, a busy, harassed nurse in London who has to go to the country to take care of her elderly aunt after an operation. She thinks it is going to be the most boring thing she has ever done. It is NOT :). We’ve got some yummy sweet recipes in there too and lots of nice things.

Reading wise, my friend the brilliant Lucy Mangan recommended The Best of Everything which I utterly adored. It’s about New York girls in the 50s, a bit Mad Men, but so honest and fascinating and brilliant, it felt like it was written yesterday. Zone One, which is good, but I’m not sure we need another zombie apocalypse whilst the Walking Dead is just being so brilliant and Justin Cronin must surely be due to deliver the follow up to the Passage soon ; The Children of Men, which is COMPLETELY awesome- I loved the film, but the book is amazing in a completely different way; a very hyped new book with a beautiful cover which I found to be a fairly thin Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell rip- off (which IS brilliant); and Boomerang by Michael Lewis, who if you have the faintest interest in our current economic situation you should be reading almost constantly.

Hope you’re well! Jenxxx

Anyway, here is one you might have missed whooshing past, but I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s by Ben Hatch, and it’s called Are We Nearly There Yet? 8000 miles in a Vauxhall Astra . At first glance you might think it’s one of those Bill Bryson light comic monologues (no disrespect to Bill Bryson by the way, I think he’s a genius who has taught more people more interesting stuff in a fun way than just about anyone since Richard Attenborough), but it’s not like that at all. It’s about a family who take off to write a guidebook for Fromer’s with their two toddlers. Whilst they do, Ben’s father gets ill (it’s non-fiction), and, due to eight hours in a car together every day for months on end, the whole family learn a lot about each other.

I think why I liked it so very much is that so many books look at bad marriages or relationships; or they focus on finding a person, then ignoring after the happy ever after, whereas this is about a living, loving, occasionally quarrelsome but clearly very happy marriage and it felt curiously life-affirming to read about it. It’s very warts and all, extremely funny, very human and very sad. If you liked One Day (ha, I have yet to meet anyone who did NOT like One Day, or who was just saying they didn’t to show off and be different), or just like good books in general, don’t let this one pass you by. OOH and for disclosure, yes, he is a friend of mine, but he has written loads of books and I have never felt moved to blog about them before :)

Other things on my pile:

A Storm of Swords (Still, Jen? Jings, yes, and I have about three more to go as well. But WHAT a storyteller.)

The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England -such a cool idea.

Little House on the Prairie I was reading this on holiday- it was one of those old things people leave behind in slightly shabby holiday cottages like the one we were in- and the baby threw it in the swimming pool. As it rained every single day on holiday I rather grumpily didn’t replace it. But it is even better than I remember and I am going to get a copy and start reading it to the boys asap.

Being a contrary character, after saying I am hardly ever on facebook, I have totally started parking out on my publisher’s page on facebook, which is at www.facebook.com/jennycolganbooks BECAUSE loads of people have, to my total surprise, started baking the recipes from the book and posting them up there. It’s amazing, I feel like I am responsible for cake popping up all over the place. Anyway, if you want to get in touch, or post your recipe pics (I am trying to figure out a way to turn it into a competition without being able to taste any of them, it’s really tricky), feel free to pop over there and say hi.

As for reading, like half the rest of the country I have been sucked- PLOUF- headlong into A Game of Thrones of which there are at least another billion and a half pages to read. It’s entirely possible I’ll never read anything ever again, although I am anxious awaiting the new Jon Ronson. Jon is one of those writers whom I will read on literally anything, I seriously think he’s a genius. I would never tell him this though, it makes him anxious that kind of thing. OOH and I am reading the six year old this. It is making us both very happy, possibly me the most. It took us a couple of goes to get into it as he was very scared of the white witch at first, but now we’re hooked. I envy him, hearing it for the very first time. “What’s Aslan?” he keeps asking, as C.S. Lewis foreshadows him brilliantly.

Hope you’re enjoying some sunshine wherever you are! Spring is here in the South of France, which means the children are constantly covered in mud and bounce about a lot I approve of both of those things.

The Book Show