A dragée is a small confection with a hard, glossy sugar shell built up around a centre — classically a whole almond, but also a hazelnut, a candied seed, a piece of chocolate or a liqueur drop. Where caramel is cooked sugar and cotton candy is spun sugar, a dragée is *panned* sugar: the shell is grown layer by layer as syrup is ladled over tumbling centres in a rotating drum. The best known are Jordan almonds — the pastel sugared almonds strewn at weddings and christenings across the Mediterranean and beyond — but the family also takes in aniseed comfits, silvered cachous, and the tiny hard balls that decorate cakes.