Every year on 5 November, Britain marks the failure of a plot to blow up Parliament by setting fire to things, and every year it rains while we do it. If you are after bonfire night baking ideas that go past parkin and toffee apples — and that keep children busy indoors while the drizzle sorts itself out — this is the plan we use at home: rocket and sparkler biscuits finished with shards of homemade cinder toffee, timed so the baking is the warm half of the evening and the fireworks are the cold ten minutes at the end.
Bonfire Night, explained for everyone else
A quick briefing for readers outside the UK, who make up a decent share of our shipping labels. In 1605 a group of conspirators hid barrels of gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament, intending to set them off on 5 November. They were caught the night before, and Britain has marked the failure every year since with bonfires, fireworks and food eaten standing up in the cold: parkin (a sticky ginger and oatmeal cake from the north of England), toffee apples, sausages, and jacket potatoes wrapped in foil and buried in the embers.
It is a good menu with one flaw: none of it gives a child anything to do. Parkin is a stir-and-pour cake, and toffee apples put a pan of molten sugar and a five-year-old into the same sentence. Biscuits hand out jobs by age, and the decorating happens at the kitchen table while the weather does whatever it likes.
Bonfire night baking ideas that go past parkin
Fireworks are bright shapes on a dark sky, which is precisely the thing iced biscuits are good at. Two shapes cover the whole theme.
Rocket biscuits
Cut rockets from a firm vanilla dough — ours is the biscuit dough that actually holds its shape, and for this bake it matters, because a rocket has fins and a nose cone that a spready dough will blur into a lozenge. Roll at 5–6mm (about ¼ inch), cut, then freeze the cut shapes for 15 minutes before they go into the oven at 180°C/350°F (160°C fan) for 10–12 minutes, until the edges are just taking colour.
Decorate the next day if you can wait. Flood the body in one strong colour, leave the nose cone and fins white, and pipe a porthole once the base coat has crusted. With icing at the right thickness this is genuinely a job for a seven-year-old holding a squeeze bottle; with icing at the wrong thickness nothing will save the evening, so read our guide to royal icing consistency before you start mixing. The flames come later, and they are the good bit.
Sparkler biscuits
A sparkler is the easiest firework to fake: a long thin rectangle for the handle, and the top third flooded white and scattered while the icing is still wet. The scattering is the point. Gold sanding sugar, white nonpareils and — the trick this whole post is building towards — crushed cinder toffee, pressed on while the surface is tacky so every shard sits at an angle and catches the light. Scattering requires no fine motor skill whatsoever, which makes it the official job of the youngest person in the room.
Cinder toffee: the science bit children remember
Cinder toffee is what Bonfire Night sweet stalls have sold for a century; elsewhere it travels as honeycomb, hokey pokey or sponge candy. It is molten sugar foamed up with bicarbonate of soda, and watching it erupt in the pan is the closest baking gets to an actual firework.
- 200g (1 cup) caster sugar
- 100g (5 tablespoons, about ⅓ cup) golden syrup — light corn syrup or honey both work outside the UK
- 2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), sifted and standing ready by the hob
Line a deep baking tray with baking paper. Warm the sugar and syrup in a large, deep saucepan — larger than looks necessary — over low heat until the sugar dissolves, then turn the heat up and boil without stirring to 150°C/300°F on a sugar thermometer. No thermometer? Stop when it is the colour of dark honey. Off the heat, whisk in the bicarbonate for two or three seconds only, then pour the foaming mass onto the tray and leave it alone. Spreading it, prodding it or tilting the tray knocks the bubbles out. Give it an hour, then snap it into shards.
This stage is adults-only at the stove, children watching from a step back; the eruption is dramatic enough that they will accept the terms. Three failure modes worth knowing. Toffee that tastes soapy got too much bicarbonate or too long a whisk. Toffee that sets dense and chewy never reached 150°C. Toffee that turns sticky overnight was stored in open air — cinder toffee pulls moisture out of the atmosphere, so keep the shards in a properly airtight tin and add them to biscuits no more than a couple of hours before eating.
On the rockets, press one jagged shard into wet orange icing at the tail and it reads instantly as exhaust flame. On the sparklers, crumbs. On everything else, also crumbs, since by this point the crumbs are disappearing anyway.
The rain plan
Early November in Britain delivers rain about as reliably as it delivers fireworks, so build the evening assuming you will be indoors for most of it.
| When | What | Who |
|---|---|---|
| The day before | Make the dough, roll, cut, bake, cool | Everyone — pressing the cutter suits ages two and up |
| Afternoon of the 5th | Make the cinder toffee; mix and tint the icing | Adults at the stove; children vote on colours |
| Early evening | Flood, pipe, scatter, press in shards | Jobs by age — youngest scatters, oldest pipes |
| When the sky clears (or does not) | Eat biscuits at the window with the lights off, watching next door's display | Everyone |
Splitting the bake across two days is not cheating; it is what stops the whole thing falling apart at 6pm. Baked, undecorated biscuits keep happily for three or four days in a tin, so you can even bake on the weekend before and save only the decorating for the night itself. If the rain does pause, the biscuits will wait by the door while you go and stand in a field for ten minutes; the toffee shards go on when you get back in.
One last note on shapes. We cut rockets, stars and starbursts year-round, because between fireworks, space parties and birthdays they never sit idle, and like everything we sell they get test-baked before they go anywhere near a customer. If your family tradition demands something more specific — a Catherine wheel, a bonfire, one very particular hedgehog — that is exactly what custom commissions are for.
However hard it rains, somebody on your street will still be out there at 8pm holding an umbrella over a rocket; wave at them from the kitchen, because you have biscuits. If you need the cutters, the rocket and star shapes are in the shop now.