As a youngster, long before I ever knew about sugar free sweets, I was a hoarder of my Saturday morning portion of goodies.  Whether this was due to some sort of race memory handed down by word of mouth from parent to child of the almost sweetless war years or, much more likely, an effort to wind up my sister who was a 'candy gobbler, is debatable.  Either way, by the time my sister had wolfed down her 4 oz or '¼ of’ goodies I was still smugly in the proud possession of an almost untouched bag of boiled gems whilst she was now going to have to be sweetless, anyway until next Saturday rolled around!

However it turns out that my sister who I smugly condemned as a greedy guts, might have actually been the wiser of the two of us.  It appears that, as the acids keep eating away at your teeth even after the aniseed twist is finished, my technique had kept my teeth soaking in a sugary bath for literally hours whilst my sister's had only been exposed for the minimum of time!

This is where sugar free sweets are deeply wonderful!  My dentist recommends them as, being sugarless, they don't create the compounds that attack the enamel of the tooth in the first place.  This means I can still adopt my measured or miserly,  approach to consuming my sweets in the knowledge that my teeth are no longer sloshing around in a bath of acid! The other advantage is that they also have none of the calories of normal sweets. Somewhat unfairly, my hyperactive, sweetie chomping sister has always led her life at such a tilt she burns off every calorie whereas my more measured pace of life was beginning to settle around my waistline – not any longer!  When friends compliment me on my new slimmer outline and I credit my dentist with the transformation, a few eyebrows are raised. Explaining the arrival of sugar free sweets in my life is a bit of let down so I normally let them stew for an hour or so with the thought of my torrid affair with dental chair, before letting out the truth! 

Sugar Free Sweets Kids 08/02/10

My daughter-in-law is a lovely girl but.......................a pain to have as the mother of my grand children!  

When the kids come round, we do gluing and sticking activities, baking and making but then, when it is clear up time, how much easier it is to pop them in front of the telly for half an hour!  But 'oh no', no more than 30 minutes telly per day and that seems already to have been done by the time they get to see me. 

Granddad likes to slip them what he calls a few 'pennyworth' of confectionery like his granddad used to smuggle to him when he himself was a boy – but again 'oh no, refined sugars will make them hyperactive !'.  I have to admit they do get a bit small and over excited sometimes but I rather suspect that is due to the excitement of being let off the 'worthy leash' rather than the effect of the treats!

Peace broke out with the discovery of sweets made with sucralose and maltose.  Granddad had popped round to see a bowling chum who had recently been diagnosed with diabetes. He was surprised to find him with a bag of what turned out to be diabetic Lun Jeelers (although they looked just like ordinary ones).  "'You can't eat those' exclaimed the old boy. 'Oh, yes I can' replied his mate 'these are sugarless sweets!' he exclaimed smugly. 'Sugar free sweets? Sounds about as good as alcohol free beer!' was the suspicious reply.  

One of these Lun Jeelers was duly tasted and tested; he couldn't actually tell the difference between these diabetic and normal sweets.  So a cunning plan was hatched, using this new discovery, to enable him to carry on the family tradition. Now when he feels like acting r-spacing: 0.0px;">the benign old granddad, he slips them a quarter of (or 100g as they are now described) our wide range of sugar free sweets that are available.  He can say, with a clear conscience that he has not been giving the kids any of those nasty sweets full of sugar and the kids and him still get to bond over a bag or two of sweeties! Perhaps I should get a few kids' DVD's so I can claim, with a clear conscience, that they haven't been watching TV either!

Isomalt and Sucralose...An Introduction 09/03/2010

Sugar free sweets have become an increasingly significant part of the food industry market now worth over $7.5 billion dollars annually and as demand continues to increase so does the range of flavours and types of foods available covering both traditional confectionery and the more esoteric.

 How do they exist though – this sounds like an oxymoron along the lines of dehydrated water! Surely boiled sweets are, as the name suggests, sugar boiled with flavours and colours, cooled and shaped. So how can boiled sugar be sugar free?

How it works is by using different types or variations of sugars. Our low sugar sweets feature isomalt and sucralose. Isomalt is what is technically called a sugar alcohol and, with it's physical characteristics being similar to conventional sugar or sucrose, means the sugarless sweet feels 'right' in the mouth. The body does not recognise or treat isomalt as a 'simple carbohydrate' but as a dietry fibre. With half the calories of sugar, low impact on blood sugar levels and none of the dental problems associated with over consumption of sucralose, isomalt produces a sugarless sweet that looks right, feels right, and tastes nearly right but is not quite sweet enough. To get the right degree of sweetness, sucralose is added. This is a high intensity sweetener which, when blended in the right proportions with isomalt, will produce a sweet that now tastes perfect as well as looking and feeling like conventional confectionery.

Isomalt is a natural product produced from sugar beet given some complex treatment. As well as it's use in the confectionery industry, isomalt is sometimes the product of choice for decorative food art sculptures and pulled sugar work. It is less prone to crystallising than sucrose and can be teased out into fine filigree baskets. sucralose, the sweetening agent in sugar free sweets, is derived from ordinary table sugar but with the structure then physically altered. Unlike with the early saccharine based offerings which had a bitter taste, most people would find it difficult, if not impossible, to 'spot the difference'. A lot of clever stuff has gone into blending isomalt, the physical copycat, with sucralose, the sweetening agent, to create a product that can be enjoyed by diabetics, weight watchers, or indeed anyone wishing to indulge a sweet tooth without any of the drawbacks of eating sugar. We stock a sweet that exemplifies this superb marriage of sucralose and isomalt, namely, the Pineapple Fizz. We've done hundreds of blind tastings with this product and have never, repeat never had anyone point it out to us as a sugar free sweet!

Fizzy Sweets and Drinks 13/03/2010

It does seem a bit strange the way we take one food stuff and turn it into a completely different form. I am not thinking those strange fusions of Indian and Italian cuisine that produce the tandoori pizza (one fusion too far I feel) but the cross over between liquid refreshments and our favourite sweets.

The good news is that not only can we now enjoy our favourite drinks in low calorie versions but as sugar free sweets. Dandelion and Burdock, an old fashioned drink that is now getting a well deserved revival, is now available in both a traditional and a sugar free sweet. A naturally fizzy drink, allegedly concocted by St Thomas Aquinas, this classic British Drink was known since the 13^th Century!

Another drink that tugs at the nostalgia bone is sarsaparilla. To me it evokes a world of itinerant travellers, quack doctors and fair ground side booths but there is nothing dodgy about the sugar alternative sweet that now carries this name! Not something we often see on British supermarket shelves, sarsaparilla drinks are widely available in Australia and slightly surprisingly, in Taiwan. A New World version of Dandelion and Burdock this drink used the sarsaparilla vine of Central America and is still claimed by many to have health benefits.

Slightly more modern in our range of sugar free sweets representing classic refreshments, is the Cola Fizz. Having said which, Cola, like sarsaparilla, was promoted in 19^th Century America as a health drink. We, in this country, became more aware of the drink as a tide of American culture flooded our cinemas and American G.I.s our towns in the middle of the 20th Century.

If you fancy a taste of the hard stuff, look for the sugar free rum and butter toffees in our range. Rich and mellow you can enjoy a taste of utter decadence with none of the guilt!

We have a cracking good sugar free Mint and Aniseed sweet but why that particular combination of herbs?  Well mint and aniseed do taste very good together, but is there some sort of scientific or historical connection between the two flavours?  Have mint and aniseed been used in tandem before?

Let's start off by looking at the aniseed element; aniseed is in fact the surprise surprise seed part of the anise plant which is an umbilliferous (has umbrella like heads of flowers) herb.  Although it has been used in this country since the 14th century and cultivated in gardens since the 16th century, we need a very hot summer for the seeds, the useful part of the plant, to actually ripen.  Having said that, it is an attractive plant with dainty leaves although this is not of huge interest to the confectioner.  Anise is cultivated on a wide scale in southern Europe, central Europe and the Mediterranean basin.  The anise fruits (or aniseed) are harvested and dried and the 2.5 % to 3.5% oil component extracted.

Possibly the first written pairing of mint & aniseed occurs in the Bible in Matthew 23  'Ye pay tithe of Mint, Anise and Cumin' this refers to it's use to pay taxes. Alternative translations hold that this should actually mean Dill – a similar flavoured plant but I am happy to quote this first pairing of Mint and Aniseed!

Aniseed has also been traditionally used to ease colic and digestion, aiding those suffering from 'hicket' (hiccups) and as a general all round stimulant, possibly why it is so popular in continental liqueurs and aperitifs; the continental digestion being a matter taken almost as seriously as the continental repast! It is not just us humans that find aniseed irresistible, using the oil by itself or with cheese is said to draw mice to their doom, whilst bees can be encouraged to return home by dotting their home with anise. Horses, dogs and other animals can be treated for digestive ailments with aniseed although it appears that pigeons find it poisonous!

Mint is the other part of this dream team.  Not to be confused with the northern damp loving peppermint, it derives it's species name Mentha from Minthe.  An attractive young lady, Minthe, caught Pluto's eye so his jealous wife Prosperina  turned the poor lass into this green shrub to be trodden underfoot.  Pluto could not reverse the spell so made sure that her scent would be sweet when she was trodden upon.  Personally, if I were to be transformed into a plant, I would prefer to be a cross, grumpy, keep away from me, smelly plant and I would get no cheer from the pleasure that others may gain by treading on me – Minthe was obviously a nice traditional Roman doormat!  Indeed the poor girl was strewn on Roman floors to welcome guests to the house.  Perhaps she has got her own back in the war of the sexes though;   Mint is a cunning plant, it bears it's male flowers on the first day and adds in the female on the second day, presumably to attract insects to the flashy male ones  first and then reaping the benefits of self pollination later.

You will also find this harmonious pair in mouth washes, the antiseptic properties of Anise Oil working well with the breath freshening mint flavour. Turner's Herbal of 1551 refers to the breath sweetening and pain killing properties of the 'Anyse' – essential when dentistry generally constituted the local blacksmith a pair of pliers removing offending teeth! So in summary, mint and aniseed, a combination that will aid digestion, cure your hiccups, freshen your breath and ease your pain!  Hopefully with our sugar free mint and aniseed sweets the dental pain killing benefits of this combination won't be needed and you can just enjoy the pungent but refreshing combinations of flavours in this traditional sweet.

Paregorics 25/03/2010

Our sugar free Army and Navy sweets are a dark lozenge, flavoured with liquorice and other herbs; very popular as a winter warmer, their pungent flavour can be enjoyed all year round.  But why are they called Army and Navy?  Did an cashiered quartermaster and a beached purser get together back in Victorian days and invent a new money making sweet to supplement their military pensions?  Certainly these sweets are a very British phenomenon and the Army and Navy sweet taps into our island's love of pungent flavoured confectionery.

Whilst we find the Army and Navy sweet when sucked slowly soothing in the mouth and comforting to the throat, in the olden days it is alleged they actually contained Camphorated Tincture of Opium and were called Paregoric, the alternative name for this drug!  During the 18th and 19th century, paregoric, the former name for Army and Navy sweets, was a normal household remedy.  This was of course the time when a fictional hero, Sherlock Holmes, puffed his way through one or two (opium) pipe problems, laudenham was the respectable refuge of many bored cloistered middle class house wives and Samuel Coleridge cemented his reputation as an inspired poet by a drug inspired poem! The modern Army and Navy sweet may still be 'Anti-tuissive' (stops you coughing) but they no longer contain this potentailly addictive drug which the mother of a few centuries ago was happy to give to fretful children !  Paregoric was, and still is, used as a treatment for digestive upset, and it is believed that these sweets were often issued to the first world war troops in the less than savoury conditions of the trenches and presumably, in pre- refrigeration days, the sometimes unreliable ships galley!

Try one of these Army and Navy sweets and tip your hat to the brave soldiers of yesteryear who sucked the full on version to relieve the coughs and aches of trench life and maybe to dull the nerve jangling shrieks above them.