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300 to 310 is known as the hard crack stage, but if you take two pieces of toffee and can bang them together and it makes a pleasant musical sound, that is known as the Hard tack stage.

I love that throughout the years even from the start of the channel you've kept up with the pokemon plushies in the background

I'm 70 and a tray of toffee with it's little hammer at Christmas was a part of Christmas just as nuts, tangerines, mince pies and Christmas pudding.

As kids in Australia, we were obsessed with trying to make the perfect toffee. The worst type was the toffee that refused to turn golden brown, and after you poured it, set white and crystalline. The best was the lockjaw toffee, which didn't set hard and brittle, but literally stuck your jaws together like glue, until you stretched it out to open your mouth so you could breathe again - heavenly!  Toffee making was a very tricky art to us kids - and that's what made it so exciting. We tried using cream of tartar, vinegar - and all those tricks. No thermometer for us - we just used to drop a dollop of toffee into a cup of cold water, and if it set, it was ready. We made toffee every weekend for years, mostly for our school cake stalls for charity. We didn't pour it into a big slab, but used individual little paper patty pans, pouring in about 1 centimetre of toffee into each, and sprinkling them with 100s and 1000s.  Now, as a rare treat, I actually prefer the gentler, creamier  taste of butterscotch, which uses the same ingredients as toffee.  Butterscotch is actually slightly under cooked toffee - or perhaps, toffee is overcooked butterscotch! Fifty years later, I am amazed - and so is my dentist -  that my teeth aren't like a row of condemned houses!

One nice thing about making something like this to give to your friends every Christmas is that your gift becomes part of their holiday tradition. And long after you're gone, people will think of your toffee (or whatever your special treat is) at Christmas and remember you. And I can tell you, now that I am an old lady, those memories are sweeter than candy.

I just love that other than a few kitchens, you haven't really messed with the formula of this channel. When so much around us is changing for the worse, it's so comforting to watch something that hasn't.

My Victorian born grandmother used to make us this as kids. Called Bonfire Toffee in our area of Yorkshire and flavoured with vinegar rather than Lemon. I still have her old recipe somewhere and I am now tempted to re-create it. The flavour was the flavour of my childhood.

I have still got my grandmother's old toffee hammer but the cost of dentistry has stopped me from using it for some time. Those hard toffees can pull fillings out and destroy crowns.

16:15 a dude named Max getting so enthusiastic about hammers--think the Beatles warned us about this one.

4:18 - The Cream of Tartar is a must in regions where your weather can be unpredictable or humid. Ohio, for example... The acid+heat helps break down the sucrose molecules into its simpler sugars which won't snap back together and crystalize. A perfect recipe, sir! Well done.

15:48 They still sell Toffee in the UK with the hammer! It's often for novelty only around Christmas, but Walkers still sell boxes with the hammer all year round.

One of my favorite references to toffee is in The Magician's Nephew from the Chronicles of Narnia when Polly and Diggory plant a toffee in the newly formed Narnia and overnight, it grows into a toffee tree with white papery leaves and juicy brown fruit that "didn't taste quite like toffee but reminded one of toffee". I never wanted a fruit so badly in my life.

WAIT a bonus episode on Friday?   SUPER YAY!

Look in every cutlery drawer in England and you’ll see a toffee hammer that hasn’t been used since the day it was acquired

half a pound of tupenny rice, half a pound of treacle, that's the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel

When I make peanut brittle (also a hard crack candy), I butter a rimless cookie sheet. When it cools and hardens, I can simply flex the sheet and the candy pops off easily.

My mom makes English Toffee for Christmas each year, and she does precut it like you tried without parchment paper.  She pours it onto a buttered cookie sheet and then cuts it as soon as she sets the pot down.  Then while it cools she dumps a bag of chocolate chips on top, smoothing it into a nice layer.  After cooling completely (sometimes in the freezer), then it pops right out and you can either recut it or snap it along the lines with your fingers.

One thing to note on her really old recipe is that it says not to even attempt to make it on a cloudy day.  She has tried it on cloudy/rainy days to test the warning, and it always takes twice as much effort and the toffee isn't as good.

5:27 wait WTF, that wasn’t some random ass whimsical line Willy Wonka pulled from his top hat, that’s a line an IRL guy actually said???

Little tidbit of information here: Treacle is like Molasses a by-product of sugar production. In the US, Molasses generally stems from sugar cane and is less sweet because more sugar was extracted. In Europe this by-product was less refined and generally the sweetener for the less affluent population since refined sugar was quite expensive. It is also often made from sugar beets or in some countries from pretty much anything with a high sugar content.  In Germany the "golden treacle" is called Rübenkraut or Rübensirup. It is a bit sweeter than Molasses, but not by much. The flavor however is a lot earthier which of course comes from the use of sugar beets and not sugar cane.
I had it as a kid when we wanted something sweet on our bread because honey was a lot more expensive. It does have nutritional value besides the sugar - it is after all what's left when you refine sugar from the plant.