Blood-red cinnamon candy apples.

An hour ahead, take the apples out of the fridge: cold, they mist up in the warm air of the kitchen, and the sugar slides off. When you're ready to start, pour the water into a small, heavy-based, high-sided pan (14 to 16 cm across at most: the sugar needs some depth), add the cinnamon stick broken in two and bring to a simmer. Turn off the heat, cover and leave to infuse while you prepare the apples.

Dip the apples in very hot water for a few seconds, then rub them hard with a clean tea towel: this is what removes the thin layer of wax on shop-bought apples, which sugar won't cling to. Dry them thoroughly, right down into the hollow around the stalk.

Pull out the stalks and push a stick in their place, nice and straight, about two thirds of the way into the apple: it mustn't spin around the stick. Lay the baking paper on a board near the hob, with a bowl of very cold water and an ice cube beside it. The bowl is for the drop test, and for cooling a finger straight away if you get splashed (plunge it in without trying to pull off the sugar, then keep it under the cold tap for ten minutes or so). At 150 °C, sugar sticks to the skin and keeps on burning: never taste it from the spoon, don't touch it, and keep your sleeves long.

Take the cinnamon out of the pan. Add the sugar, the glucose syrup (or the lemon juice) and the colouring, which goes in now so it doesn't spit at the end of cooking. Stir just enough to wet all the sugar, wipe off any grains stuck to the sides, then set over a medium heat. As soon as the syrup boils, leave the spoon alone.

Let it cook without stirring, for about 8 to 10 minutes. If the pan heats more on one side, simply turn it round on the heat, holding it by the handle. If crystals form on the sides, brush them with a pastry brush dipped in cold water: they melt and slide back into the syrup. It's those crystals, along with a spoon stirred at the wrong moment, that make sugar crystallise.

Above 130 °C, the temperature climbs very fast: stay close. Take the pan off the heat as soon as the thermometer, dipped into the syrup without touching the bottom, reads 148 to 150 °C: that's hard crack. Without a thermometer, do the drop test with the pan off the heat: let a little syrup fall into the bowl of cold water. At hard crack, it sets at once into threads that snap clean, like glass, and don't stick to your teeth. If it bends or stays sticky, put it back on the heat for a minute and try again. Don't go above 155 °C: the sugar starts to caramelise, the red turns brick-coloured, then the taste turns bitter.

Off the heat, add the pinch of chilli, and the ground cinnamon if you want it to come through more, with a single turn of the spatula. Tilt the pan, your hand protected by a tea towel, so the sugar pools on one side. Hold an apple by its stick, dip it into the sugar and turn it right round to coat it all the way up to the base of the stick.

Lift it out, still turning it above the pan for a few seconds: the excess drips back in a thread that grows thinner and thinner. Wipe the underside against the rim of the pan, set the apple on the baking paper, stick pointing up, and move straight on to the next one, as the sugar thickens within a few minutes. If it gets too thick to coat, put the pan back over a low heat for a few seconds, without stirring.

Leave to harden for 15 minutes at room temperature, somewhere dry, never in the fridge. Meanwhile, fill the pan with water and bring it to the boil: the sugar left in the bottom dissolves all by itself. Serve one apple each, or one between two. To bite in without chipping a tooth, go in from the side, where the shell is thinnest, rather than from the top. Then hold out the apple: your partner bites right where you just did.