Artifice and deception are all part of the confectioners art.  Petit fours mimic, in marzipan form, miniature fruits, the shading of colours so deceptive that you feel that some magic has shrunk real fresh fruit into Lilliputian proportions.  Some other sweets are just frankly not what they say on the label!  Coconut seems particularly prone to passing itself off in sweets that are named for an entirely different product!  Coconut Mushrooms are cute little chaps that really should have a woodland elf perched on them but have never had anything to do with fungi.  They do at least have the decency to look like mushrooms though, unlike 'teacakes.  Let me re-cap; a teacake is usually taken to be a sweet, slightly spicy, fruit studded, bread roll, served split in two and slathered with butter.  Ideally this should be served on a flowery plate by an elderly waitress, looking likely to shakily spill tea in one's lap, in a chintzy 'Cosy Cafe' somewhere.  So why should a delicious confection of coconut dusted caramel that looks more like a whippet breeders flat cap decide to call itself a teacake?  The mystery deepens as the next sweet along turns out to be a toasted teacake, I refer you to the lines above but please now imagine the butter is slowly melting into a brown fringed, hot toasted teacake.  The mock teacake item does indeed have a browned top but looks more like a slightly over tanned marshmallow, certainly not something from your traditional bakers.  In fact this yummy sweet is more like a macaroon than a teacake, a blend of coconut and condensed milk that has been lightly toasted to give the tanned flat sides.

Even more an extreme masquerade is that of sweet tobacco; once again that master of disguise, the coconut, is featured  This time the coconut is in the form of strands dusted in sweet chocolate powder which will slowly sift to the bottom of the jar - wonderful to attack with a teaspoon when the rest of the jar has been emptied.  Nothing to do with tobacco, in these enlightened and politically correct times I am surprised the name has not been made to be changed

I am sure I am not the only one who can remember chocolate sticks covered in rice paper and sold in convincingly continental appearing soft packs which mocked cigarettes well enough to provoke the rage of teachers and other adults.  Nowadays 'candy sticks' are poor echoes of this delightfully inappropriate piece of marketing and packaging.

Some names have been forced to be changed ñ the E.U. was concerned that some people may actually believe that Lung Healers would do as their title claimed, hence their re-christening as Lun Jeelers!  Jesmona Black Bullets contain no lead and would not fit a gun of any calibre, instead these sweets originating from the North East were very popular with miners.  Smoking was not allowed under ground and possibly the black colour of these wrapped mints struck a cord with the miners and distracted them from their nicotine cravings.  Another traditional mint, bulls eyes, is I  am delighted to say absolutely nothing to do with any part of the cow.  Sweet peanuts, looking exactly like what we called monkey nuts when we bought the peanuts in shells from the green grocer are another cunning pretence.  Very slightly salty in the centre, these nutty tasting boiled sweets actually have a crispy cracknell in the middle without an actual nut in sight!  Another nutty misnomer are chewing nuts, delicious little nuggets of firm toffee enrobed in chocolate, again completely nut free.

Fun and frivolity, pretence and make believe are all part of the appeal of sweets.  Marshmallow can be mounded into tiny ice creams or squidgy fruits, jelly sweets come in a thousand different shapes and sizes.  It is good to sometimes not be to literal and to step into the world of make believe where you can believe a dozen impossible things before breakfast, to paraphrase Alice through the Looking Glass!