Once you are armed with your ticket, this little tin soldier slides into the woodwork allowing you to enter the factory. Tiered seating arranged to one side of the factory floor lets you see the lassie with her microphone and protective gloves who talks about the goodies on the table beside her. The big blue bag on the table is Cadbury's chocolate, acquired in these big 24kg blocks - evidently much cheaper to 'import' from the experts than to make from scratch. There are 12 blocks in each pack and they have the Cadbury logo on them just like the little slabs which we can buy in the shops - only a whole lot bigger! This is melted down and used to coat nuts, raisins, kiwi fruit - whatever takes your fancy really.
The table that this guy is working on is heated so that the goo stays gooey while he adds colour and flavour - on this day, the flavour he was adding was passionfruit and he divided this lot into yellow, orange and red.
Plenty of mixing and faffing about while the lassie with the microphone talked about the biggest lollipop in the world and the Guiness Book of Records and so on. From the hot table, the lollipop goo gets placed on the stretchers - first outside the cage and then inside on the white machine with 'arms' that you can see there (the picture of the stretching process on the machine didn't come out very well so doesn't appear here!)
This table is also heated, otherwise it all cools too quickly and becomes brittle. The stretching continues once the coloured stripes have been added until you end up with a long sausage shape. Once the whole caboodle is thin enough, some of the mile long candy is fashioned into good old fashioned candy canes - some straight and some with their Little Bo Peep hooks on the end - and the rest is handed to the enthusiastic audience to make their own lollipops with. Because you have to work so quickly, most of the kiddies need a bit of assistance from the big people, but for the most part, everyone ended up with passable lollipops.
This is a model of the huge lollipop which was part of the Guiness Book of Records story - it was made and donated to the Auckland Childrens' Hospital, where it stood outside the main entrance for a couple of months until it was decided (for health and safety reasons) to remove it, since it was not only becoming covered in all sorts of undesirable beasties and bugs, but also had loads of little teeth marks at about pre-schooler and toddler height!
The table that this guy is working on is heated so that the goo stays gooey while he adds colour and flavour - on this day, the flavour he was adding was passionfruit and he divided this lot into yellow, orange and red.
Plenty of mixing and faffing about while the lassie with the microphone talked about the biggest lollipop in the world and the Guiness Book of Records and so on. From the hot table, the lollipop goo gets placed on the stretchers - first outside the cage and then inside on the white machine with 'arms' that you can see there (the picture of the stretching process on the machine didn't come out very well so doesn't appear here!)
This table is also heated, otherwise it all cools too quickly and becomes brittle. The stretching continues once the coloured stripes have been added until you end up with a long sausage shape. Once the whole caboodle is thin enough, some of the mile long candy is fashioned into good old fashioned candy canes - some straight and some with their Little Bo Peep hooks on the end - and the rest is handed to the enthusiastic audience to make their own lollipops with. Because you have to work so quickly, most of the kiddies need a bit of assistance from the big people, but for the most part, everyone ended up with passable lollipops.
This is a model of the huge lollipop which was part of the Guiness Book of Records story - it was made and donated to the Auckland Childrens' Hospital, where it stood outside the main entrance for a couple of months until it was decided (for health and safety reasons) to remove it, since it was not only becoming covered in all sorts of undesirable beasties and bugs, but also had loads of little teeth marks at about pre-schooler and toddler height!
It was great fun being a kid again for an hour or so and once that was over, we reverted to being big people again and worked on consuming the Baileys Fudge within the required three weeks! Dis al!
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