Hey dudes, I'm Hilah and today on Hilah Cooking we're turning
my kitchen into Willy Wonka's Wonderland
and we're gonna make some toffee.
We're gonna make some crunchy, buttery, almond toffee.
This is great for Christmas gifts
or just great to eat all by yourself like this.
Ahhhh!
(upbeat music)
The best thing about this toffee is that
there's only a few ingredients.
Butter, we're gonna use a whole lot of butter,
and sugar, also kind of a lot sugar,
but were making candy so what the hell.
Some vanilla, some salt and some nuts.
You can make this about nuts if you have an allergy issue.
I like to use almonds or pecans, pistachios would be nice and
I've lightly toasted these just by putting them on a dry skillet
over medium heat and kind of stirring around for two or three
minutes until they start to smell kind of nosty,
toasty and nutty.
Nosty it's a new word.
I do recommend doing that before you start making the candy
because once we start boiling all the syrup and everything
together it kinda goes really fast.
Just have these already done.
So oh and also an anal probe, just kidding,
a probe thermometer or
a candy thermometer or something like this.
I'll put a link to the one that
I like in the descriptive box below.
Okay, let's go to the stove.
I'm gonna put this butter in the pot over low heat.
We're gonna melt it down, we're gonna add the sugar,
a tablespoon of water and a little pinch of salt and just
stir this constantly over low until butter is melted
completely and the sugar is pretty much dissolved.
Then we're gonna crank the heat up to medium or medium high and
we're gonna put our thermometer in there and just without
stirring it now just let it come up to 290° Fahrenheit.
Right about now you might be getting the urge to stick your
finger in that and give it a taste.
Don't do that is as hot as the
core of the Earth and you will burn your fingers.
Just resist the urge.
Okay, once it reaches 290° we're gonna pop the thermometer out,
we're gonna turn off the heat and we're gonna stir in about a
cup of the nuts, whatever nuts you're using and a little bit of
vanilla extract and stir that around vigorously until
everything is coated.
As soon as you added your nuts and your vanilla you want to
immediately spread it out onto a baking sheet that's been lined
with either silicone mat like mine or some parchment paper and
we're basically almost done.
Viola!
That's an instrument, not a French word that means voilá.
And then this is what we have.
It sets up almost immediately, I'm not gonna touch it.
It's still really hot but these little drops here,
that kind of splattered, that's already set up.
So I'm gonna put this in the fridge to help it solidify a
little bit faster and while it's cooling we'll make our chocolate
spread to go on top.
Okay, for the chocolate topping I'm using some dark chocolate
baking chunks these are like 60 something percent cacao.
I am no chocolatier which is French for chocolate expert but
something I read a long time going and it seems to work is to
temper the chocolate.
That is like when you tempering means like get it to the right
temperature basically so that once it cools off it'll be nice
and crunchy again in hard.
Basically you take three quarters of
your chocolate and melt that.
I'm just gonna use microwave, you can do a double boiler, too,
and then you add in the last quarter and stir it until
they're all melted and that like the cold chocolate to you add in
kind of like sets the crystalline structure for the
rest of the chocolate
so it like resets it to be to firm up
whenever it's cooled off.
If you ever read Cats Cradle/Ice Nine,
that's basically the theory we're working with.
So I want to take out about 1/4 of my chunks and I'm gonna put
the rest of this in the microwave for like,
this is like so unsanitary, I'm gonna put the rest of this in
the microwave for 30 second blasts and then give it a stir
until it's almost completely melted and then I'll show you
what that looks like.
Alright, after about a minute in the microwave,
I stirred it at 30 seconds, it looks like this.
It's mostly melted.
There's a couple chunks.
So I'm going to add in my still cold chocolate and we're just
gonna stir this together until those bits are melted too.
I do think a glass bowl works really well for this because it
retains more heat so the chocolate,
cools off slower than it would if you're using a metal bowl but
if you're doing a double boiler he might end up in a metal bowl
and that's okay, too.
Okay, it's almost all melted.
I'm just gonna leave it there I think if I leave it for
30 more seconds it'll all be fine.
Gonna grab our cooled toffee and we'll top this mother.
Okay.
Alright, so this is nice and hard.
If you wanted to you could score it into rectangles or squares or
something before you put it in the fridge and then it makes
easier to break but I can't like the irregular shards that it
breaks into like this.
Gonna chocolate it up.
(upbeat jazz music)
Okay, now you can leave it plain or you can
sprinkle it with some more nuts, some dried fruit,
dried cherries, cranberries would be pretty,
you could do a little coarse salt.
So let's do some nuts
on part of it
and let's do some dried cherries on part of it.
And like I was saying I think like green pistachios and maybe
red dried cranberries would be
really pretty and Christmasy looking.
And then maybe just some coarse salt down here.
Let's do some salt on that part too and some more almonds just
because salt and nuts go so nicely together.
Okay, now I'll put this back in the fridge for a few minutes
until the chocolate is set and
then we'll break it up and eat it.
We'll break up and eat it.
And that's it.
Once the chocolate is firm to the touch and looks dull it
should be fully set so you can break it up into chunks.
If you want to get this as gifts,
it's great for that.
I would recommend breaking up and then like layering in
between wax paper or parchment before you put it in a container
of some kind just so they don't all stick together.
I think it's best if you keep in the fridge just because the
texture seems better but that might just be me.
If you want another edible gift idea,
I did chocolate truffles video that all tag onto the end of
this video but now I'm gonna eat this.
Mmmm.
(loud crunch) Oh my God!
It's like really easy to chew.
And it's buttery and it's caramely,
it's nutty and it's chocolatey.
Mmm, it's so good.
Thank you so much for watching.
Don't forget to subscribe.
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and I will see you next week with more videos.
Okay, bye!