candy | Adventures in Thyme

Pistachio Brittle

I love Fall. The changing colors of the leaves, the crisp mornings, and the fellowship of holiday season. Our gifts to friends and family are usually small tins of baked yumminess, or a cookie variety plate. This year in our quest to add to the gifting repertoire I considered brittle. Hot sugar however requires a little extra minding than a mere oven timer. Please be careful if you have little ones in the house, or are attending to chores elsewhere – a boiling pot of sugar needs to be watched! You’ll also need a candy thermometer for this one. Let’s get cooking!

Ingredients

1 cup hard cider (I used a pumpkin flavored)
1 cup light corn syrup
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda
2 Tbsp butter (room temperature) + extra for baking pan
~1 cup roasted/salted pistachios (shelled of course)

Warm an oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Prepare a baking pan lined with tin foil (and lightly butter). Place in oven.

Into a pot add the hard cider down to cinnamon. Stir to combine and heat until 300 degrees Fahrenheit, which is Hard Crack stage. You will be tempted to stir this as it boils, DON’T. The sugar up the side of the pot crystallizes and can alter the consistency of your brittle. It probably took my pot about 30 mins to hit hard crack so be patient.

As you get ready for Hard Crack to be reached on your candy thermometer, have the butter and baking soda standing by. Once the magic number is reached, swiftly remove the pan from the oven and set close by. Remove your pot from the burner and add the butter and baking soda to your pot. Stir quickly and thoroughly to incorporate. Add pistachios and stir – your mixture will be solidifying which is going to make spreading it in the pan difficult – hence the warm pan and your expeditious stirring skills!

Pour the mixture onto the pan and quickly spread out as best as you can. This sugar will be VERY hot, please be careful. Sprinkle more pistachios on the top as you like. Set aside to cool.

The pot and any utensils you used should be soaked in hot water to help you clean up.

Once the brittle is cooled, break into bite sized or gift bag sizes. I angled sheet of cooked brittle and gently knocked it from the underside with a lemon squeezer so as not to damage the pretty face of the brittle. 🙂

Enjoy!

Chocolate Fudge

Familiar with the old saying, “Families are like fudge, a little sweet with a few nuts”? This is also true about our fudge (and our family BTW, okay TMI, back to the fudge…).

This is an old family recipe, going back at least 50 years, and each Christmas the faded index card comes out and fudge is made, and handed out to friends and family.

So our gift to you, the super secret family recipe. Happy Holidays!

2 Cups Sugar
12-14 Large Marshmallows
2/3 cup evaporated milk (1 small can, not sweetened condensed milk)
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (you can substitute butter scotch, mint chocolate, etc., it takes longer to set up though)
1 cup chopped pecans (you can substitute walnuts)
1/4 pound butter (1 stick)
1 teaspoon Vanilla

Combine sugar, marshmallows and canned milk in a large cast iron or stainless steel skillet. (Do not use non-stick, you will scratch it.) Bring mixture to a boil over medium to medium high heat, stirring constantly with a wire spring whisk. (The spring whisk will stir to the bottom of the pan and keep the mixture from sticking and burning.)_ Boil for 2 minutes.

Remove from heat and pour over the chocolate chips, nuts and butter. Add the vanilla. Beat by hand with a wooden spoon until it is of a spreading consistency (it will be relatively cool by that point, butter scotch and some other flavors won’t get as think and may need to be refrigerated to set up completely.) DO NOT use an electric mixer, you will get a very good chocolate sauce but it will never set up.

Pour the fudge into a greased 8×8 or 9×9 inch square pan. Let set over night. Cut into 3/4 to 1 inch squares and remove from pan.

Hard Cider Brittle

The Fudge Factor