Candy!

I enjoy trying to make things, things I like to eat. This includes a few breakfast or dinner meals, but mostly it's baked goods, desserts, and candy. A number of the dinners I enjoy include baked aspects, like curried pot pie and a casserole with drop biscuit topping as well as biscuits, bread, and tortillas for other meals. My recent candy attempts have worked amazingly well.

First off, I made some butter toffee. Lee isn't a big fan of many of the things I make candy-wise, but he loves chocolate bars containing toffee. I wasn't sure how it would turn out, and nuts are expensive here, so I made it sans almond topping, but it was delicious:


I read quite a few different recipes, because I've found that especially with candy, there are typically many different possible recipes, but some aspects remain the same no matter what. I trust Cooking for Engineers quite a bit, so adapted their recipe:

Cover a tray with parchment paper or a silicone baking sheet. Mine has a gutter around the edges, and some of the toffee dripped down into the gutter but didn't stick to the pan at all. Parchment paper may or may not be necessary, but the recipe says to use it. First off, make sure your candy thermometer is reading reliably. Boil some water, it should be 100 C or 212 F. At boiling, mine reads 110 C, so I have to adjust temperatures by about 10 C.

Put in a saucepan at least twice as large as these ingredients:
225 g unsalted butter
1/8 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
A large splash (approximately 2 tsp) of water

Boil over low/medium low heat. Stir constantly; it will bubble up while the water boils off and will stay at approximately 110 C (120 C on my thermometer) while this happens. Then, it will thicken and the temperature will rise fairly quickly. Continue stirring and heating until it's at least 150 C but before it hits 160 C.

Remove from heat once it's at 150 C and stir in:
1 tsp vanilla

Pour onto the pan and spread using a silicone spatula. I grated a bunch of milk chocolate from a large block over half of the hot toffee, and laid a 60 g chocolate bar on the other half. Then, I spread the chocolate around the top of the toffee as it melted from the heat of the toffee. I tossed it into the refrigerator to cool for awhile, then broke it up. It was delicious.