Hard candy — boiled sweets, candy canes, humbugs, drops and rock — is the basic glassy-sugar confection: a syrup of sugar and glucose boiled to the hard-crack stage, flavoured and coloured, then cooled to an amorphous, transparent glass that shatters and slowly dissolves in the mouth. Peppermint is its classic flavour, in striped canes, pillow-shaped humbugs and clear mints, though the class runs to fruit drops, barley sugar, aniseed balls and sticks of seaside rock.