Work In Progress - coconut ice

Not really happy yet. Taste is good but it seems too crumbly and the colour is def wrong. Whatever happened to cochineal? Looked up cochineal in the dictionary and it says "dried bodies of female insect reared on cactus in Mexico etc., used for making a scarlet dye". Who'll stock that these days?

St Andrew's Day passed in a blur of the kind of rain I'm more used to in Scotland than here in London.

Been looking through this old recipe book. Coconut Ice might be a good addition to our range of one.

Ready to go.

We're selling lots of these now. "Jolly Tablet Bites" ie a round of tablet with a Smartie squashed into the top as the tablet sets. I notice, in my rather small-world way, that Smarties are much less brightly coloured than they used to be.

Our friends at Green & Fortune (the fabulous cafe in the new Kings Place (arts 'n office 'n exhibition space) building by the canal near Kings X) sell bars and bags now. We did loads of these special bars for their Events team.

Tablet is very good for you because it cheers you up on a rainy day.

The lovely Albion Caff in Shoreditch is selling our tablet this week. Gave them lots of samples to make sure everyone tries it and buys it!

St Andrew's Day coming up soon. We're busy with what we've called table gifts ie little bags of tablet for dinners. I like this thistle stamp but usually the tags chosen are a bit more trad in style.

The (handmade Scottish) tablet biz is exciting although there are days when I wish there were "people" to do stuff with me. And now I mention it some of those things would be: neat printing and cutting of labels; being dead good at tying bows on little cello bags and being the person who prepares the kitchen for Tablet Making then puts it all together again when it's done. All my jobs today. The job I like doing is calling people to say "did you get the tablet?" which is really Sales. Sales calls - something I've avoided doing my entire life. Too shy. Turns out when you send someone a bag of sweets, they don't mind talking. It's been kind of OK.

We are now making wedding favours of tablet. Little cellophane bags of tablet for the table, each with a small label and ribbon tie. Very sweet with coffee.

Variations on tablet

Have discovered the collage button. Recently invented sweets-on-top version of our tablet. Even sweeter.

This is West Sands, St Andrews is one of the best beaches ever. Even when people say it's busy there's hardly anyone there.

swamped!

We're selling small bars of tablet in a big London arts centre now and they've just placed their second order. Very exciting.

This is a pic of some tablet. There are only a few ingredients - sugar, unsalted butter, condensed and fresh milk - and when I ate it as a child I never thought about whether it was tricky to make or not. But it is. Thing is, even the odd batch that's not quite right is still very easy to spoon out of the pot, and eat.