Salted Caramels.

Happy New Year!

I've been away for the past few weeks, so this is my first post since Christmas! I'm glad to be back.
How was your New Year's eve? Brent and I went to the Falls Festival in Marion Bay with some of our friends, and it looked a bit like this:

And then Brent and I went on a trip to his shack up north for a week and it looked a bit like this:


So, I've had a very relaxed holiday and it's about time I finish posting my Christmas recipes (how slack that I didn't do it before).

(And in these really hard times we are facing, I think it's good to be able to be thankful for the holidays you can take. I wouldn't be surprised if the people of Queensland wish they were on holiday somewhere else at the moment.)

I made these salted caramels to give as gifts to my large family for Christmas, and they were pretty tasty. I had a bit of trouble with them though. The first recipe I used didn't work so well, and I ended up with a too salty mess of sweet, softly sticky caramels, which isn't really what I wanted. I don't think the instructions on the recipe were very instructive, if you know what I mean. I wanted chewy, not too hard-not  too soft caramels, that would travel well, and this recipe from Everybody Likes Sandwiches was perfect.
After one disaster, I finally got it right.

So I think you should face your candy fears and try this recipe. It's not that hard, promise! And it's totally rewarding. You'll definitely feel like Susie Housewife after making these.

Salted Caramels.
From Everybody Likes Sandwiches.

1 cup thin cream
5 tbs butter, diced
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1/4 cup glucose syrup
1/4 cup water

Lightly grease some baking paper and line a square 23×23cm dish.
In a small saucepan, bring cream, butter, and salt to a boil. Set aside.
In a large saucepan, boil water, glucose and sugar, whisking until sugar is dissolved. Boil mixture (don’t stir!) until a deep caramel colour is reached, about 150C (300F). It the caramel isn't quite dark enough, you can cook it higher than this temperature.
Very slowly pour in cream mix (it will bubble up), stirring frequently over a rapid boil until caramel reaches around 120C (250F) on thermometer, about 10 minutes.
Pour into baking dish and cool for at least 2 hours. Cut into pieces and wrap in waxed paper.

Almond Nougat.

Im not sure why I suddenly decided that nougat was a christmas treat. I don't think I've ever associated nougat with christmas before. But it seems to be a good combination.

I made this nougat to give as christmas treats, along with some relish and some caramels (soon to be posted). I'd given up on biscuits because I decided that they weren't going to last very long and no one was going to eat heaps of gingerbread on christmas day.

Making the nougat is fairly straight-forward. You boil the sugar mixture until it hits the right temperature on a candy thermometer and then beat it into some egg whites. But I guess it's a bit overwhelming using the candy thermometer.

Get over that fear! Make some nougat for your lovely family this christmas! They last a lot longer than cookies! And besides, it's fun wrapping them up individually, and you get to eat all the bits that you trim off!

Almond Nougat:
From 'Sweet Food'
Makes 1kg (about 30 pieces)

500g sugar
1 cup liquid glucose/corn syrup
1/2 cup honey
2 egg whites
1 tsp vanilla essence
125g butter, softened
60g roasted almonds
100g glace cherries

Line and grease a 28 by 18cm dish.
Place sugar, glucose, honey, salt and 1/4 cup water in a large heavy-based pan and stir over low heat until sugar dissolves.
Boil until mix reaches 250F on a candy thermometer.
Meanwhile, beat the egg whites in a large bowl until hard peaks form.
Slowly pour 1/4 of the syrup into the egg whites and beat for 5 mins, or until mix holds its shape.
Place remaining syrup over heat until it reaches 290F.
Pour slowly into meringue with the beaters running. Beat until really thick.
Add the vanilla and butter and beat for a further 5 mins.
Fold in almonds and cherries with a metal spoon, try to separate them out so they're not in clumps.
Pour mix into tin and smooth the top.
Refrigerate for at least 4 hours, before cutting into pieces with a very sharp knife and wrapping in waxed paper or cellophane.
Keep refrigerated.

White christmas.

I remember my Mum making white christmas when I was younger. She always used copha to bind the good stuff in the middle, and being older now, I don't remember if I liked it or not. Vegetable shortening, in my mind, is a bit like butter that sets hard, and doesn't leave a good impression in my minds version of white christmas.

That's why I used white chocolate in this recipe instead of copha. And instead of sultanas, and red and green glace cherries, I used dried cranberries and pistachio's for a bit more of a grown up taste. I did keep the rice bubbles and a few glace cherries just to hint at traditional, though. You could probably even up the chocolate a bit, to make the chocolate to filling ratio lean a bit more towards chocolate. I'd recommend up to 50g more.

I took these into work so that I wouldn't eat them all, and after the girls worked out what was in them, really enjoyed them. I think these will please kids and adults alike, but don't take my word for it, make them for yourself and bring a little bit of white christmas into your life this holiday.

Bonus: they're really, really quick. I mean, 10 mins quick. Probably less, if you can melt your chocolate fast!

White Christmas:

The measurements for this came from "Sweet Food" but I changed most of the ingredients. So I guess we'll say it has been inspired by.

500g-550g white chocolate, broken into pieces

1 1/2 cups rice bubbles

1 cup desiccated coconut

1/3 cup red glace cherries

1/2 cup chopped pistachio kernels

1/2 cup chopped dried cranberries.

Melt the chocolate (I use the bain-marie method, but the microwave is fine).

While the chocolate is melting, mix all the other ingredients in a large bowl.

Stir in the melted chocolate and mix everything until well combined.

Pour into a foil lined 28/18cm tin and press everything firmly down. The mixture should be quite flat, rather than high.

Refrigerate until hard. Cut into rectangles or triangles.

Candy nuts & survival techniques.

It's nearly time for holidays. Uni has so many holidays, I just don't know what to do with them all. I've started planning ways to spend my long, and sunny days and hopefully I'll get to do them all, rather than just hanging around and wasting my time, which is what I normally do. So I've made a list. Of things that I desperately want to do in my holidays, before the next uni semester starts and I start wishing that I'd done something fun over the summer.

• Go to the beach. If it's warm enough, I might even get to go swimming (!)
• Have a picnic. With a proper wicker basket and potato salad and champagne and big sun hats.
• Have a barbecue. At the beach!
• Go to the place where you can pick your own berries. I need to find out what that place is called...
• Make jam. With the berries that I picked.
• Make tomato relish.
• Make lots of yummy christmasy things to give as presents.
• Decorate the house all nice for christmas.
• Spend time with friends. Thats an important one.
• Go camping. For a couple of days, at least.

Before any of that can happen, I have to get through my final three days of study. Having snacks is a good way to get you through.
I looked at lots of recipes for candy nuts before I made these. I ended up using two recipes, from David Lebovitz and Everybody Likes Sandwiches. The nuts were meant to be sweet and salty and spicy all at once, but because I never properly measure spices out (seriously, who does that?) mine were just sweet, with a big salt hit every now and then. I'm not complaining though. They're still good. I took these to work and they were gone in an hour. But next time I'll remember to put more spices in.

Recipe:
Adapted from Everybody Likes Sandwiches and David Lebovitz

1 cup salted peanuts
1 cup raw almonds
1 cup sugar (I used mostly white with a bit of brown thrown in for good luck)
1/3 cup water
sprinkle of course sea salt, cinammon, paprika and cayenne pepper.

In a big pot, mix the nuts, sugar and water. Heat over medium heat and stir frequently. After a while, the nuts are supposed to get sandy with the crystalised sugar (mine didn't, I just had heaps of syrup, which didn't go away).
Keep stirring until the nuts and syrup start to get golden/bronze. (It should take you roughly 20 mins to get to this stage).
Take off the heat, and scrape the nuts onto a tray lined with baking paper.
Leave to cool and then break up the nuts and try not to eat them all at once!

p.s. if you'd like better instructions than mine, I'd recommend going to David Lebovitz, he's got pictures for each stage of the process.