Thursday, February 11, 2010

Chocolate-Almond Buttercrunch Toffee or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Candy.

According to this National Geographic article, 47% of consumers in this country will exchange candy this upcoming Valentine's Day, which totals up to a billion dollars in sales.  That's a lot of candy!  Instead of spending a bunch of money to buy your significant other some candy, why not impress them with some homemade goodness, made with ingredients readily available in your cabinets and refrigerators?

I'm not entirely why I was looking at David Lebovitz's blog, but I was browsing along and came across this delicious recipe for chocolate-almond buttercrunch toffee.  I was hooked by the name alone!  However, I was held back by the fact that I've been really good about sticking to my eating plan (and losing 20 lb since Christmas), but with the day off today, I couldn't resist the call of sweet and delicious toffee.

I found a sealed bag of slivered almonds in the back of my freezer, so they went into the frying pan to get lightly toasted, then spread half of them onto a quarter sheet that was extremely lightly oiled with about a 1/2 teaspoon of grapeseed oil.  Looking back, I could have toasted the almonds a little more, but I didn't want them to burn.


Into a saucepan goes a stick of butter, sugar, brown sugar, salt and water, then it gets brought up to a nice and toasty 300 degrees.  As an aside, I love my digital thermometer, but I need to get me a traditional glass candy thermometer - more reliable and easier to deal with.


After reaching temperature, in goes some vanilla and a little bit of baking soda (which causes the stuff to foam up like crazy).  It gets poured out onto the sheet with the almonds, then gets topped with semisweet chocolate.  The chocolate sits for about 2 minutes, at which point it gets all melted and then spread over the toffee...


...and sprinkled with the rest of the almonds, cooled and broken into pieces.


To say that it is decadent and delicious would be an understatement - this stuff is just as good (if not better) than anything you could buy in the store, and was made with ingredients that probably added up to about $4 or so.  Do yourself a favor - put down the Old Monmouth and go get yourself candy-making tomorrow.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Damn you and your damn chocolate-almond buttercrunch toffee. I ate nearly half of it. I'm on a diet!!!

Caitlyn Fritsche said...

...do want!