English Toffee

Ann Rogers Recipe, originally uploaded by foodchronicles.

Years and years ago I went to Relief Society and tasted English Toffee made by one of the older women in our area. It was wonderful! Everyone raved about how good it was and she consented to give each of us the recipe. This is my copy.

This year I am trying to make candy or cookies as gifts. I also have a goal of not using recipes that call for corn syrup. I am not a fan of it and know I could find a few good candy recipes that do not use it. Well, Ann's recipe is one of those.

You begin by chopping up some raw almonds and milk chocolate. Butter a cookie sheet with butter also, be liberal with your butter.



Then measure out two cups of sugar, a pound of butter, and a cup of water. Make sure you use good butter! It is the base of flavor for your toffee and you don't want a butter that has been in a warehouse picking up icky flavors. Put your ingredients in a heavy bottom pan, with a lid. Slowly bring the mixture to a boil. It will be light yellow in color.



Once it begins to boil, add your almonds to the mix and begin stirring. You will stir constantly until it is ready to pour into the baking sheet. It says on the recipe you stir until it cooks down, changes color a bit and begins to smoke. Oh. My. What does that mean? After the mixture boiled for about 10 minutes it looked like this:



I didn't think it had turned color enough and decided to get out my candy thermometer just to make sure. I know that English Toffee is a soft crunch type of candy so I chose to make sure it was at that level before pouring it out and making a huge mess. It was at 220 degrees. It needed to be 270+ before it would reach the proper stage and so I continued stirring for another 15 minutes. Toffee is not for the faint hearted!

Check again. It's almost there!



Finally it had turned color enough to make a difference. I checked the temp and it was ready. I still did not get the mixture to "smoke". Still I poured it out onto the pan and smoothed it out.



Next, when the toffee has cooled a bit sprinkle the surface with your chopped chocolate. Then with an offset spatula spread the chocolate around making sure you coat the entire surface about 1/4 of an inch.



Quickly sprinkle the chopped walnuts over the chocolate. Now put it in the refrigerator to get the chocolate to set up. The toffee will still be warm so it will take about thirty minutes.



Once it has set up, turn it out onto a waxed paper covered surface and add chocolate to the other side, repeating with walnuts again also. You'll have to melt your chocolate this time as the toffee is cooled and will not melt the chocolate for you!

Voila! You have made English Toffee. Give it a try. This was my first time making this recipe and wow did it turn out good! Or maybe I should say it was awful and I decided I better keep it all to myself. ;-)