Toffee

I have always loved my mom's toffee. She made it every year at Christmastime and I have always looked forward to it. A few years ago we first started trying to make our own batch at Christmas with very mixed (alright, mostly bad) results. After making a few batches with my mom, calling her a couple of times to walk me through it, and a little trial and error on our part, I can finally successfully and happily make batch after batch. Yum.

In case you are not in the mood to stalk my mother for her magic tips, here is the super simple recipe with the silly little tips that somehow make it all work!

Toffee

Ingredients
1 cup butter (2 cubes-do not use unsalted!)
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
Chocolate Chips
Ground Walnuts

Combine water and butter in a saucepan and stir on a med-high heat until the butter is all melted. Add in the sugar, being careful to pour it- you do not want little sugar crystals all over the spoon and pan that could fall into your mixture later in your process when the rest are disolved-this could ruin everything! Stir slowly until sugar is disolved and mixture starts to boil.

Here is the key part- Cover the mixture and leave it covered for about 60 seconds. This will wash any sugar, etc off the sides of the pan. NOW GET A CLEAN SPOON. Yes, throw your other spoon into the sink. It could be contaminated :)

Uncover and stir, stir, stir. Your mixture will start to look frothy and thicken up. (If your toffee is not going to work you will know about now because it will start to seperate and just look like water with oil floating around in it. Sad.) After about 6-7 minutes of stiring, the toffee will start to turn brown. Keep stiring and in only a minute or two longer, it will have turned the color of a brown paper bag (or 290 degrees F). The darker it gets, the harder the finished toffee will end up. Take it off the heat and pour it out onto a cookie sheet. It will look chunky and a little bubbly at first, but will start to smooth out.

After letting it settle for a minute you can sprinkle the chocolate chips on. Spread the chocolate as it melts and then top it off with a sprinkle of crushed walnuts. When it is cool, break it into pieces. You can put them in the freezer (or outside in the freezing cold!) for a few minutes to harden up the chocolate if it is too gooey. Enjoy!

Hope this works for you as well as it does for me!