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.

Sponge toffee - Part Deux

The advantage of making your own sponge toffee is that you can create your own flavors. In this post, we will look at espresso flavored sponge toffee. The recipe is:

1/4 cup espresso

1/4 cup honey

1 cup sugar (any combination of white, brown, and/or Turbinado)

1 tsp vanilla

2 tsp baking soda

(Notice that there is no vinegar here. It really does not bring anything to the party, so leave it out.)

As with any other sponge toffee recipe, heat the first 4 ingredients in a sauce pan until 300 F, quickly mix in the baking soda, and pour it all into a greased pan or parchment paper-lined pan. If you use a silicon mat, make sure the sides of the pan are either greased or lined with parchment paper. That's it. For the results, here's a video:

In the video, I tried putting a few chocolate chips on the bottom of the pan to see what would happen. It's actually a good idea if you were going to drizzle chocolate on it anyway. The advantage is that the heat of the toffee when you pour it on top of the chocolate will melt the chocolate and make it flat. I'm not sure why that's a good thing, but if you want that kind of presentation, there you go. Fancy, eh?

Upon closer inspection, the pan was actually too big to make a difference in thickness of the toffee. For this amount of candy, use a smaller pan, perhaps a square brownie pan, so that the toffee has less room to spread out. In the batch that I showed in the video, the sides were a little higher but the middle was exactly the same height as the other slab of sponge toffee. However, the taste was definitely better in this batch because the espresso and honey contribute some nice complex flavors. Corn syrup (replaced by honey here) is cheaper but really has no flavor. The molasses from the brown sugar also adds some nice dark flavor to the toffee. If you want to make a lot of sponge toffee with honey, BMS has a great deal - 5 pounds of wildflower honey for only $13.99. That's enough honey to make sponge toffee for your friends and your neighbors' friends.

For another person's experiences and pictures of the sponge toffee-making process, see the Chocolate Apprentice. That page also has a recipe for nut croquant.

Making sponge toffee and homemade Crunchie bars

When I was growing up in Canada, one of my favourite chocolate bars was the Cadbury Crunchie bar, which is not readily available in Boston. I found some a couple of weeks ago at a candy store in Back Bay but they were $3 each! [Update: you can get a case of 24 Crunchie bars on Amazon.com for less than $30 (and free shipping) now.] As a poor student, it is not possible to enjoy Crunchie on a regular basis. So, I decided to look online to see how easy it was to make sponge toffee at home. It's actually quite easy.

The first time I tried making sponge toffee, it didn't turn out right because I didn't use a candy thermometer and didn't heat the sugar up to the appropriate temperature (300F). So, if you want to try this, go to a kitchen supply store and spend the $11 or $12 for a candy thermometer! Kitchenwitch, in Jamaica Plain, carries them and BMS Paper Company usually has them too. Kitchenwitch also has a $4 thermometer but it's just a glass thermometer and I'm a bit of a klutz. That's why I went with the $11 model, which encases the thermometer in a stainless steel frame. It would take some effort to break that. Macy's and other stores with kitchen sections have candy thermometers too. If you don't want to leave your house, Amazon has a great selection. (Click on the pictures on this page to go directly to the product on Amazon.com)

There are several recipes online, in video form (e.g. on Youtube) and print form (e.g. Cooking Channel website). The basic recipe is 1 cup sugar (brown or white), 1 cup corn syrup (or other form of liquified sugar, such as molasses, Lyle's golden syrup or honey), and 1 Tbsp baking soda. However, it can easily be altered to make different flavors, such as ginger molasses, maple, or vanilla.

In addition to the ingredients, you will need a saucepan, a candy thermometer, and a parchment paper-lined or greased pan to put the toffee. Some recipes call for vinegar but it's not necessary. The baking soda will bubble up without it. Make sure your saucepan is large enough to accommodate the extra volume when the toffee bubbles up. Also, use a wooden spoon to stir the mixture. A whisk doesn't work well because the toffee gets stuck in between the wires. I also noticed that some recipes tell you to grease the parchment paper. This is not necessary because the whole point of using parchment paper is that it is naturally non-stick!

For those of you who are curious about the science behind sponge toffee, here's an article for your enjoyment:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/24/sugar-honeycomb-cinder-toffee

Cheap but uber-awesome candy!
Even if you use honey and turbinado sugar, it should cost you less than $5 to make a pan of sponge toffee, which you can then dip into chocolate to make a bunch of homemade misshapen Crunchie bars (see pictures below). If you're really on a budget, use corn syrup (around $3-4 a bottle with enough for more than 2 batches) with some water and white sugar. For the price of a Crunchie bar, you can make a whole pan of sponge toffee. For chocolate dipping, get a bag of chocolate chips from Trader Joe's (around $3) and you're all set. A bag of chocolate chips should be enough to make at least 8 or 9 bars, making the cost of each bar about $1. The other advantage of making your own chocolate bars is that you can dip the sponge toffee in dark chocolate, which counter-balances the sweetness of the sponge toffee better than the milk chocolate in the store-bought bars. If you're too lazy to dip each piece in chocolate, pour the melted chocolate over the toffee before breaking it into pieces. This is probably one of the least expensive candies to make and it's a great gift to give at Christmas or any time.

Here is a video of me making this recipe:

In this video, I might have stirred the toffee a little too much. Stir until the baking soda is mixed in but not much more than that.

Sponge toffee from another batch - with honey and less stirring after the baking soda was added.

Sponge toffee pieces - ready to be dipped in chocolate (or stored in an airtight container)

Sponge toffee, freshly dipped in melted semi-sweet chocolate chips

Chocolate-dipped sponge toffee ready to store (or devour)!

For more variations on this recipe, please see my other posts on sponge toffee:

Sponge Toffee - Part Deux

Sponge Toffee - Part Trois (with butter)