the honeycomb toffee of New Zealand: golden syrup and sugar boiled to hard crack, aerated in one violent second with bicarbonate of soda, and broken into brittle amber shards for ice cream
Origin: New Zealand
From the journey of Sugar Cane.
New Zealand grows no cane, and that is precisely the point: it is a country whose sugar culture is entirely one of refining and consumption. The Chelsea Sugar Refinery opened at Birkenhead on Auckland's harbour in 1884 to process raw sugar shipped from Queensland and Fiji, and it still does; for well over a century almost every grain of sugar and every tin of golden syrup in the country has come from that one plant, which is why golden syrup is so deeply embedded in New Zealand and Australian baking. Hokey pokey is the purest expression of it. It is honeycomb toffee, made by boiling golden syrup and sugar to the hard-crack stage and then stirring in bicarbonate of soda, which decomposes instantly in the heat and floods the molten sugar with carbon dioxide, so that it foams up to four times its volume and sets as a rigid amber sponge. Broken into pieces and folded through vanilla ice cream, it became hokey pokey ice cream, which has been among the country's best-selling flavours for decades and is regarded there as a national possession. The name is older than the sweet and is thought to come from the cry of nineteenth-century itinerant ice-cream sellers, itself probably a corruption of an Italian street vendor's patter.
Golden syrup is what gives hokey pokey its particular flavour and its colour, and there is no true substitute; light corn syrup gives a paler, blander honeycomb, and honey scorches. The mixture is above 150°C when the bicarbonate goes in and causes severe burns, so keep children well away from the pan. For hokey pokey ice cream, break the set honeycomb into rough centimetre pieces and fold them through softened good vanilla ice cream at the very last moment before refreezing, since the sugar begins to dissolve on contact and will vanish entirely if it sits in the base overnight. The same confection is called honeycomb or cinder toffee in Britain, where it is the centre of a Crunchie bar, and sponge toffee in Canada; the New Zealand version is distinguished by using golden syrup rather than plain sugar and water.
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