The Popular Honeycomb-Like Candy You Must Try When Visiting Northern Ireland

Should you find yourself in Northern Ireland, keep your eyes open for a candy that looks like honeycomb toffee. Though honeycomb toffee offers a bark that can be easily broken apart by hand, the bright yellow candy known as Yellowman or Yellaman is made in hard chunks that require a hammer for chipping off pieces. For several centuries, the sweet has been sold at Ballycastle's Ould Lammas Fair. The event has earned the title of Ireland's oldest fair, and the popularity of the candy has prompted local stores to sell it in small plastic bags to visitors.

At the fair, the crunchy sweet is commonly found alongside the dried purple seaweed known as dulse. The combination of the sweet honeycomb candy and the savory harvested seaweed is a curious pairing that has left many to speculate how the two became intertwined. Though the food pairing is an unusual one, the flavorful duo has found its way into the lyrics of a folk song: "Did you treat your Mary Ann to some dulse and Yellow Man / At the Ould Lammas Fair in Ballycastle-O?"

The recipe to make Yellowman builds upon a classic honeycomb toffee recipe but incorporates golden syrup, brown sugar, Irish butter, and baking soda into the mix. Yellowman recipes also call for vinegar. To make the candy, the sugar mixture is heated up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit until a hard, brittle texture forms. Original candy makers would place a more malleable version onto hanging contraptions so that the toffee mixture could be pulled and shaped in a process that would lighten the candy's hue. Once the candy solidified and hardened, the honeycomb-like chunks would be chipped off to create pieces that could then be wrapped and distributed to customers with a demanding sweet tooth.

Instead of dealing with high temperatures from heating sugar at home, you can buy the candy at shops like Belfast's Aunt Sandra's Candy Factory. Other candy shops in Northern Ireland have baskets of the sweets on display for visitors to purchase and take with them. In addition to being enjoyed as a standalone treat, broken pieces of Yellowman can be swirled into cookie recipes, sprinkled on top of bowls of ice cream, or even used to bring a sweet touch to drinks, both as a drink garnish (crunch up the pieces to line a glass rim or place a chunk directly into a poured cocktail) or when stirred into a whiskey-enhanced Irish coffee.