Halloween is fast approaching! Shops are beginning to fill with little treats for the annual trick or treaters knocking on your door. Pumpkins will soon be available, for carving into scary faces and lighting with night lights. As soon as the clock turns back on October 25th, we’ll see the nights get dark pretty quickly, and those ‘Jack-o-lanterns’ will start appearing in windows – smiling out at us with their eerie glow!

Toffee Apples are everyone’s favourite this time of year. There’s something about biting into the crunchy crackly caramel surrounding a juicy ripe apple – very satisfying and toothsome! Irish apples are in season now, just in time for Halloween. Our apple growers include Ballycross Apple Farm and The Apple Farm in Cahir, who both have on site shops and sell their fruit fresh in season, plus as wonderful farm pressed juices. What a treat!

It looks like toffee apples may have been invented first in America, by William Kolb,  a Newark based candy maker. They are known as Candy Apples Stateside. It is said that this particular candy maker invented caramel coated apples,  colouring the caramel red and infusing it with cinnamon, specially for the Christmas market. But toffee apples have now become much more well known at Halloween here,  and on Guy Fawkes night (November 5th) in the UK, where they are enjoyed round a roaring bonfire.

We suggest you find yourself some gorgeous Irish dessert apples to make this typical childhood sweet of Halloween. Our Toffee Apple  recipe will show you how. They are easy to make, but just one word of warning.  Care is needed when making the caramel. Molten sugar is a very hot substance. It can burn skin very easily and very badly. That isn’t meant to put you off – you just need take care with it. Don’t let children do this unless they are older and capable in the kitchen – and well supervised by an adult. Caramel making is not a job for young children. That said, once you master the art of making caramel,  you’ll be sporting your own plate of toffee apples for the trick or treaters this coming  Halloween night!