Sponge Toffee - Part Trois

Since I've been getting so many page views on the pages about sponge toffee, I just had to try another variation and share it with my readers. This time, I decided to try out a recipe that includes butter. I also wanted to add some bitter flavors again to balance out the sweetness. I added some espresso, as in Sponge Toffee - Part Deux, but also some rum.

Here's the recipe:
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup killer bee honey
1 Tbsp butter
2 tsp rum
1/4 cup espresso
1 tsp vanilla

Heat in a saucepan (2Qt) until it reaches 300 F, stirring only enough to mix the ingredients together. Use either a silicon or wood spatula. Then, add 2 tsp sifted baking soda and stir until evenly distributed. Pour into a parchment paper-lined brownie pan and let cool for about an hour. This is what it should look like:

The good news is that this sponge toffee tastes a lot richer than the batches without butter. The bitterness is nice though. One room mate said that the bitterness adds a bit of burnt flavor to it. If you don't like this bitter/burnt flavor, break the toffee into pieces and dip into chocolate, which will mellow out the flavors. The texture was a little harder or crunchier than the previous batches without butter. It was slightly easier to control the size of pieces when breaking it, but still shattered as before. The shattering is not bad because you can pour the crumbs into the last bit of melted chocolate and drop little mounds on parchment/waxed paper to make some yummy sponge toffee crumb chocolate mounds!

However, the bad news is that the butter prevents the toffee from bubbling up as high. There were still bubbles in the toffee but it the final product was thinner than the stuff without butter. However, it might have been because the brownie pan was still too big and the toffee had too much room to spread out. Also,  the rum and espresso don't really complement each other because they're both bitter flavors. Next time, I would probably leave out the espresso or the rum because you can't really taste both at the same time.

It still tastes great, so I highly recommend this recipe either as is or without the rum or espresso. A little more honey might be good too.