How Boiled Lollies Are Made by Hand, and Why It Still Matters

By Jodie Smith, Product & Hamper Manager at The Gourmet Pantry.

A boiled lolly is made by cooking sugar and glucose until almost all the water has gone, tipping the molten mass onto a cooled slab, then colouring, flavouring, folding and pulling it while it is still hot enough to move. It is cut or dropped into shape before it sets hard, and the whole window is only a few minutes long.

That is still how the seven lines we range are made, by hand, at Brown's Confectionery Factory at Sovereign Hill in Ballarat. All seven sit on the Sovereign Hill range page at $9.95 a bag.

How a boiled lolly is made by hand

Sovereign Hill is the open-air museum in Ballarat that rebuilds the Victorian goldfields of the 1850s as a working main street, shopfronts and all. Brown's Confectionery Factory is one of those shopfronts, and it is where these lollies are made, by hand, to a traditional recipe. That line is on the back of every bag, and it is the whole reason we range them.

Boiled lolly work of this kind does not scale neatly. Sugar and glucose are cooked until nearly all the water has boiled off, tipped onto a cooled slab, then coloured, flavoured and folded while the mass is still hot enough to move. It gets turned, pulled into a rope and cut or dropped before it sets hard. Hot, heavy, fast work with a short window, which is why most of what fills a supermarket confectionery aisle is no longer made this way.

Ballarat is about an hour up the highway from our packing bench in Corio, which makes these some of the few things on our shelves made closer to us than to the people we post them to. We taste everything we range. This range gets tasted rather more often than it strictly needs to be.

What a raspberry drop tastes like

Small, deep red, glassy. A raspberry drop is meant to be sucked rather than crunched, and the order of events is the point of the thing. The sour arrives first and tightens your jaw for a second or two, then falls away and leaves something much closer to raspberry jam behind it. Sweet on its own would be forgettable. Sour on its own is a novelty you finish once and never buy again. The two in sequence are why people ask for this lolly by name, often decades after the last one they had.

Texture does as much work as flavour here. A properly boiled sweet is sugar held in a glass state, with almost no water left in it, so it dissolves slowly and evenly instead of crumbling or going chalky at the end. One drop lasts several minutes. It will also win a fight with a back molar, so let it dissolve.

Why people come looking for these years later

Most people searching for raspberry drops by name are not discovering them. They are trying to find them again. There is usually a school excursion to Ballarat in the story, a bag bought at the lolly shop on the way out, and then a gap of ten or twenty years, because this is not a supermarket line and there is no obvious place to look for it.

That is worth knowing if you are buying for someone else. A bag of these does not land like a generic box of sweets, because for a lot of Australians they come attached to one specific day out. For a grandparent, a homesick expat or anyone who grew up in regional Victoria, you are handing back something they had quietly assumed was gone.

The names in this range have barely moved in a century: raspberry, acid, barley sugar, strawberries and cream, eucalyptus. What they have that most of a modern confectionery aisle does not is restraint. One flavour, done properly, with nothing coating it and nothing filled inside it. That also makes them unusually easy to buy for someone you do not know well. A boiled lolly needs no fridge, carries no serving instructions, survives a week in a handbag and asks nothing of the person receiving it beyond a sweet tooth.

The seven lines, and which one to buy

Every line is the same price, $9.95, so choosing is a question of taste rather than budget. Bags are 175g or 185g depending on the line.

Buying for one person, get the flavour they mention rather than the assortment. Buying for a household, raspberry drops and rainbow shells between them cover most tables. All seven sit together in our confectionery range if you want to see them side by side.

The sweet that survives an Australian December

Chocolate posted across the country in the third week of December needs cool handling and a bit of luck. Boiled sugar needs neither. A bag of raspberry drops arrives in the condition it left in, and if it does spend an afternoon in a hot letterbox the lollies soften and then set again rather than being ruined. For anything going interstate, or anywhere north, that is the difference between a gift and a gamble. Our guide to Christmas food in Australia makes the same argument about the rest of the table.

The price does something useful too. Three bags come to under $30, which sits inside most Kris Kringle limits and reads as more considered than one $30 object. Add a tin from the biscuit shelf and you have a present rather than a last stop at the shops. If you are building the box yourself, our guide to what to put in a Christmas hamper has the structure. If you would rather not, the Christmas hampers we pack in Corio come with a sweet layer already in them.

How to stop an open bag welding into one lump

Boiled sugar pulls moisture out of the air, and an Australian summer supplies plenty of it. Leave a bag open on the bench in February and the lollies go tacky, then stick to one another, then set as a single red brick. Nothing is wrong with them at that point, but you will need a hammer and a sense of humour.

Three habits prevent it. Decant the bag into a jar that seals rather than folding the packet over. Keep the jar in a cupboard, not the fridge, since condensation does more damage than warmth. And keep it away from the kettle and the dishwasher vent, the two most humid spots in a kitchen. If the lump has already formed, ten minutes in the freezer, a tea towel and a rolling pin will break it into shards.

Three things to do with them besides eat them

Stained-glass biscuits. Cut a shape out of the middle of a gingerbread or shortbread biscuit before baking, sit it on baking paper, fill the hole with crushed lollies and bake as normal. The sugar melts flat and sets clear as the biscuit cools. Rainbow shells give the most colours from one bag; raspberry drops give a red that reads as red rather than pink. Crush to about the size of a grain of rice so the pieces melt evenly, and cool the biscuits on the tray: the window stays soft after the biscuit firms up.

Shards through ice cream. Fold crushed acid drops or raspberry drops through softened vanilla ice cream and refreeze. Do it within a day of serving: left a week, the shards dissolve and the crunch goes.

Barley sugar in black tea. An old habit and still a good one. One barley sugar stirred into strong black tea sweetens it and leaves a faint toffee note that plain sugar does not.

Ordering, posting and timing

Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our packing room in Corio, Victoria. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100, which a few bags of lollies will not reach alone, so add them to the rest of the Christmas order.

Australia Post confirms its Christmas cutoff dates in October, and interstate parcels always close earlier than local ones. Treat mid December as the practical limit for anything that has to arrive before the day, and earlier again for remote addresses. Boiled lollies keep for months and need no cool handling in transit, so there is nothing to gain by leaving this one late.

Questions we get about Sovereign Hill lollies

Can you make boiled lollies at home?

You can, and the sugar thermometer is the part people skip. Sugar, water and glucose go to hard crack, around 150 °C: short of that they stay chewy, past it they taste burnt. Colour and flavour go in off the heat, because that temperature destroys both. The hard part is the handling rather than the recipe. Sugar at that heat scalds straight through skin, and the slab sets in a couple of minutes.

Does Woolworths sell Sovereign Hill lollies?

We have not seen them in the major supermarkets. This is a small-batch line made at Brown's Confectionery Factory at Sovereign Hill, sold on site and through a handful of specialist food retailers, ourselves included. If you have been reading confectionery aisles looking for that label, that is why it has not turned up.

What lollies does the Sovereign Hill lolly shop make?

The seven we stock and post are raspberry drops, acid drops, barley sugar, strawberries and cream, salted caramel drops, eucalyptus drops and rainbow shells, all hand-made to traditional recipes and all $9.95 a bag. Raspberry is the one that built the reputation. Barley sugar and eucalyptus are the two people most often buy for someone older.

How long do boiled lollies keep?

A long time. There is very little water left in a hard-boiled sweet, so an unopened bag keeps for months in a cool, dry cupboard, and the date on the pack gives the exact figure. Once open, humidity matters more than time, so an airtight jar holds them in far better condition than the packet.

If you want the ones you remember, start with a bag of raspberry drops and add a second flavour for whoever you are sharing them with. All seven lines in the Sovereign Hill range are here, hand-made in Ballarat and hand-packed by our team in Corio.