Baking Bouchon - Recipe 21: Toffee

Eventually I will make caramel without burning it.  I promise!  It's a good thing I overbuy ingredients and can make everything twice.  Sheesh!

I actually shouldn't have made this today.  I was scheduled to make Hot Cross Buns, Apple Turnovers and Demi-Baguettes before I made this so I skipped ahead A LOT.  However, we're going out of town tomorrow and could not have eaten any of that stuff before we left.  Plus, I needed a hostess gift to bring to the people we're staying with and this worked out just fine.

Making toffee is similar to making caramel so you've seen this stuff before... butter, sugar, water and corn syrup gets cooked together.

The recipe has you bring the toffee to 310 degrees, then add the baking soda and salt (which gives you some wicked foaming) and then continue to cook until 320 degrees.  Yeah, not so much.

I swear this time I was NOT multitasking, I did NOT get distracted and I did EXACTLY what the instructions said. 

The second I added the baking soda the temperature instantly shot up to 340 degrees and I had burnt toffee.




See... burned and icky.

Luckily, I realized something was wrong before I added the almonds to the toffee because I did not have extra almonds and if I have been forced to go back to the store in order to remake the toffee it very well might not have happened.  Going to the store multiple times is so very inefficient and I don't enjoy inefficient.

The second time I actually turned the heat off when the toffee hit 300 degrees and stirred in the baking soda and salt, then turned it back on until it hit 320 degrees.  This was a much more successful method (thank goodness because I was not going to make this a third time, not matter how much I needed a hostess gift.  Those people would have gotten a bottle of wine and liked it).

The cooked toffee gets a generous dose of chopped almonds stirred into it.  I was a bit skeptical about this as I've never had toffee with almonds inside of it but I really like the addition.  There are also almonds sprinkled on the outside so you really need to like almonds.

Once it's all mixed up the toffee is dumped out onto a silpat, topped with a second silpat and rolled out until it's nice and flat.

In theory I needed confectionary rulers (I didn't even look it up, I knew I wasn't buying them) to make straight lines out of the edges of the toffee but I didn't have those so it was more of an oval shape which was a non-issue.

I kept a little bit of the burnt toffee to compare to the good stuff.  See how much darker it is in the bottom photo?  Big difference.

Chocolate is an absolute must when it comes to toffee!  This recipe calls for a 70% chocolate, so not too sweet.  (The % in chocolate talks about how much actual chocolate there is in there compared to sugar, so 100% chocolate has no sugar in it)  I had a bunch of different chocolates on hand so I used 70%, 40% and 100% to get pretty close to that. 

I've never actually tempered chocolate before.  It's an interesting little process that is supposed to give the chocolate a shinier appearance and a better snap when it's broken.  You basically melt the chocolate, then cool it down to room temperature, then heat it up just a little bit more in order coat whatever you're coating.  I did it but I'm not entirely convinced it made a huge difference.

I have to say that the instructions to coat the toffee with chocolate on both sides are totally bogus.  There is no way this could possibly work.  For the first side you spread chocolate on parchment paper, then sprinkle almonds on it and set the hardened toffee on top of it.  It's hard to picture but because the almonds are sitting on top of the really thin layer of chocolate, the toffee doesn't even touch the chocolate.  Geez! 

So, I spread the chocolate on the top side, sprinkled it with almonds and then flipped it over, scraped the chocolate off the parchment paper and re-spread it on the toffee. 

So one side is not so pretty... whatever!

All in all, this toffee is awesome and I'll be very proud when I hand it over to my hosts in these cute mason jars.  My toffee standard is the toffee at Trader Joe's and this is just as good.  The problem is that I had to cut myself off from buying toffee at Trader Joe's because I have no self control.  Luckily, most of the toffee is prettily packaged in jars now so I can't do too much damage.

Julie