Dear readers,
In California, I worked at a market that sold 8 ounces of a particular candy, for $11.95. To my amazement and disgust, we could not keep it on the shelf. Out of contempt for its already-rich manufacturers, I won't call it by name, and instead I have taken up the challenge of reverse-engineering the recipe for the benefit of the common people. That's right, I'm like the Robin Hood of sweets. Where's my little green outfit, complete with a feather in my pea pod shaped hat? Mom? Or maybe just a green apron...I digress:
The product in question seemed to have the consistency of a warm caramel candy, but the flavor and opacity of what I think of as toffee. To the lab! The computer lab, that is, to discover the difference between caramel and toffee. It seems, according to the internet, that caramel is made with sugar and milk cooked to whatever hardness on the candy hardness scale, in contrast to toffee, which is made with sugar and butter OR, as the candy hardness scale suggests, it has everything to do both with the dairy ingredient as well as the temperature to which its cooked.
In the pursuit of our illusive half-caramel, half-toffee, I scrapped the temperature-sensitive definition and grabbed the butter and got started...
Using a simple recipe from the webtubes that did not include corn syrup (it's bad enough for you, without using corn syrup - this stuff has always freaked me out), I simply decided not to cook the butter/sugar/water mixture to the "toffee" temperature of between 300-310°F, but instead to somewhere between soft and firm ball (234-248°). The results were good but not soft enough, but still delicious!
In California, I worked at a market that sold 8 ounces of a particular candy, for $11.95. To my amazement and disgust, we could not keep it on the shelf. Out of contempt for its already-rich manufacturers, I won't call it by name, and instead I have taken up the challenge of reverse-engineering the recipe for the benefit of the common people. That's right, I'm like the Robin Hood of sweets. Where's my little green outfit, complete with a feather in my pea pod shaped hat? Mom? Or maybe just a green apron...I digress:
The product in question seemed to have the consistency of a warm caramel candy, but the flavor and opacity of what I think of as toffee. To the lab! The computer lab, that is, to discover the difference between caramel and toffee. It seems, according to the internet, that caramel is made with sugar and milk cooked to whatever hardness on the candy hardness scale, in contrast to toffee, which is made with sugar and butter OR, as the candy hardness scale suggests, it has everything to do both with the dairy ingredient as well as the temperature to which its cooked.
In the pursuit of our illusive half-caramel, half-toffee, I scrapped the temperature-sensitive definition and grabbed the butter and got started...
Using a simple recipe from the webtubes that did not include corn syrup (it's bad enough for you, without using corn syrup - this stuff has always freaked me out), I simply decided not to cook the butter/sugar/water mixture to the "toffee" temperature of between 300-310°F, but instead to somewhere between soft and firm ball (234-248°). The results were good but not soft enough, but still delicious!
I will include the final recipe! In the meantime, does anyone have a foolproof muffin recipe?
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