Sometimes there are failures...

The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious.
~C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

My experience of reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was probably similar to many others, in that I had no idea what Turkish Delight was, but dreamed of it being some incredible delicacy, the perfect sweet. My imaginings made it into something similar to the Indian dessert gulab jamun; a fried pastry soaked in syrup. I don't know why. I suppose even then I loved fried things! And I thought it should be something warm, if Edmund was eating it in the midst of an endless winter. When I learned what Turkish Delight really was (a starch and sugar mixture, flavored with rosewater or other extracts), I felt a trifle disappointed.

Nevertheless, when my friend Maureen proposed that we attempt to make the stuff, I threw myself into the project. I searched fruitlessly for rose water (Maureen finally found it at a gourmet food store), I mixed the cornstarch glue, I tested the sugar syrup to see if it was at the softball stage, I did my part to stir the combined mixture for the hour specified, as it turned pale golden.

I think my first real inkling it might not turn out well was when someone (there were various guests and onlookers present) observed that it looked rather like vaseline. And they were right:



It might have still worked out okay, except that we think that the fridge went on overdrive during the two day interlude between the brewing of the TD and the return of Maureen from her business trip, when we planned to sample it. It seems that the whole pan froze, and then defrosted, resulting in a strange gelatinous slab drifting in a thick syrup. We gamely tried to extract and slice the slab and dust it with sugar, and both Bob and Matt (Maureen's husband) bravely sampled the result.

But alas, the fate of the Turkish Delight was as ugly as it was:



Maybe next time we will just try fudge!