We're going nuts here!

Hello my friends!

It's first day of December and the snow we got yesterday, got me straight into the Christmas mood. :) We still keep the candy mode on and today we're making some macadamia chocolate caramel. So get your sugar and thermometers ready since it's about the get hot and sticky!

Dig from your cupboards:

200g (7 oz) Macadamia nuts

4 Tbsp Water

350g (12 oz) Sugar

125g (4,4 oz) Butter

1 Tbsp Molasses or Dark Syrup

1/4 Tsp Sea salt

1 Tsp Vanilla extract

1/4 Tsp Baking Soda

150g (5 oz) Dark Chocolate (60-70%)

So begin  by heating up the oven to 160°C (320 F). You need to get some tan on those macadamias but be careful! These nuts are very greasy so they burn easily if you don't keep an eye on them. Roast them for 5 mins and check up on them if they're golden brown. If not, giva a couple more minutes for them. Spread those golden goodies in a tin where they pretty much cover up the whole bottom. Then we move on to the caramel.

Measure the water, sugar, butter, syrup/ molasses and salt into a pan with a thick bottom. Heat it up with a low temperature so everything dissolves and mixes up together. Then bring the heat up and let it boil until the sugar reaches the 'hard crack' level (154°C). You see how the sugar cooks and get darker colored. At this point, remember that the sugar is EXTREMELY HOT! If you get that on you, it doesn't come off by wiping but put the part under some cold water so the sugar hardens.

When the caramel is cooked, take it aside and mix the vanilla extract and baking soda in it. Stir the mixture but not too much! Pour the caramel quickly on to the nuts and try to get it settled by shaking and tapping the sides a bit.

Chop the chocolate and sprinkle it evenly on top of the caramel. The caramel is still so hot that the chocolate simply just melt on it and you can smoothen it out with a palette knife. Let the treat cool down for a good while before cutting it roughly into the pieces. You can store it in a air tight box but don't put it into a fridge or a freezer.

In my opinion, it was fun to see a different side of the sugar. Earlier I have made fluffy marshmallows and smooth fudge but this time the texture was harder. There was some serious cooking and watching not to burn the sugar but I think I passed this one honorably. This combination was very neat with the sweet chocolate combined to a bit salty caramel. The macadamias gave their own texture for the treat so I'd give 8/10 for this. :)

See you next time!

Baking square and fare

Yummy weekend for you all!

Yesterday I got together with my best friend by suggesting that we could bake something delicious for the weekend. Chocolate Caramel squares were the outcome. The recipe had some new ingredients which I've never heard of but everything went better than expected! :)

The squares were made in three different sections so we started off by making the dough for the bottom.

We measured 115 g (4 oz) of butter, 175 g (6 oz) of flours and 55 g (~1,9 oz) of fine golden sugar. Surprisingly this was totally a new experience for me. I've always worked on my doughs by hand but this... oh lawdy, this was so easy! I'm definitely going to use the mixer a lot more in the future! It doesn't even matter that our mixer is over 10 years old. It's still working amazingly well. The only problem we had was the size of the cake tin. I never seem to have the right size tins so we had to improvise itsy bit. Then again you have to remember when you're hardcore baking you can't avoid accidents. :D

Despite the little difficulties we were done with the dough and ready to move on to the caramel filling. At this point I encountered the most bizarre ingredient I have used so far. A can of condensed milk. I did some Internet research and found out that it's not that common product in Finnish grocery stores. The fact that you really can't replace that with anything else (you're welcome to prove me wrong!) made me even consider for a visit to the local Russian store. Fortunately I headed first to the biggest grocery store around and found what I was looking for! The next surprise was revealed at the point where I was opening the can. It was all gooey and I wouldn't call that good until I built up my courage to taste it.. The very common phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" was very clear to me at that moment. That gooey milk product tasted like vanilla pudding! I tried to convince my friend and brother to taste but I think the gooeyness was too much :D

Anyways, we added that can of condensed milk à 397 g (~14 oz), 175 g (6 oz) of butter, 115 g (4 oz) of fine golden sugar, 3 Tbsp of fructose corn syrup in the pan.

After heating it up and mixing for a while it got pretty thick so we were ready to pour that on the dough.

After pouring the caramel the masterpiece was put the fridge to settle until it was firm. It was already late and my friend left before I melted the chocolate for the top so I don't have any pictures of that. Although you can see from the first picture that they came out pretty nice. :)

What about the taste?

I'd say that these are perfect for big parties. These are pretty sweet and according to persons I fed these, said that one square is definitely enough. Overall everything went as expected and the outcome was very good. I'd definitely give 4 out of five stars for this recipe.

For tomorrow I've plans to make my first macarons so wish me luck! :) There isn't going to be any videos from that since I want to focus as much as I can in to the making process. All I can say that it's going to be awesome day tomorrow and I hope you guys have chictastic time until then!