I hope to God You're not as Dumb

Every year at this time I have to fight the urge. The urge to fill freezer bags with plastic sweets, rubber chews and spend hours at the cooker, attempting to prove that I am one of these amazing homemakers who can create tablet as quick as I can produce a jammy piece.

With no children in the house this year, I had no reason to feel "wicked". I came in closed the curtains, had limited light and sat and hoped that my door would not knock.

As luck would have it, I was actually feeling rough and headed to bed at 8.

But despite my best efforts at ignoring Halloween, that inbuilt urge within me boiled to the surface tonight. As I sat watching my way through Landward, Watching Us, and then Garden Time (what the hell is wrong with me? ), I decided that I should once more attempt my halloween tablet.

When I was little, the houses where we received a little block of homemade tablet were the treasure troves we grew to covet. It's a Scottish thing; we have an inbuilt urge to eat sugar straight out of the bag, and if that is too coarse for us, then we device methods of cooking it so that we get the biggest sugar rush in as quick a time as possible.

Therefore tonight I stood for forty minutes at the cooker, risking blisters and burns and threw all the sugar I could find into a pot and stirred and stirred and stirred.

When it reached the optimum temperature, i.e., splashes were flying out of the pot in all directions and scalding my poor fingers and wrists, I lifted it from the stove, and poured it into my prepared tray!

I stood aghast as it continued to boil in the tray and grew almost three times in size, just at the point at which I thought the kitchen was a goner, it popped, and sunk back into the pan.

These are the off-cuts from the edge and these, mixed together into some vanilla ice-cream... Beyond heaven.