Success with English Toffee

Today I made english toffee. It worked out. I am on a roll with several successes now in my candy making career. The key is the thermometer, you must treat it like a friend and not an enemy.

English toffee starts out as 2 sticks of butter, slowly melted in a heavy pot.
- 1 cup of sugar is added and slowly heated( i've learned slow heating is totally important).
- Next add a little water and corn syrup - not sure why.
- Then heat the mixture slowly over medium low heat until the thermometer reads 300 ˚F. This is called the hard crack stage of candy.
- During the heating process, all the components are chemically reacting and it's cool to watch the sugary butter mixture change consistencies with the rising temperature. It's kind of like a lava lamp, you can watch the blobs of mixture turn into eachother while it cooks.

-After 300˚F, you remove the pot from the heat and add 3/4 c toasted almonds and let it cool to RT (room temp) on a cookie sheet. Then pour melted milk chocolate over the top.

Oh, snap it's good.

After a long hiatus...

I'm back to cooking.

Two weeks ago, I bought a book on Candy Making. I am going to be an expert in the intricate science of making candy. It's really actually difficult to make candy, so I've learned so far. A thermometer, the correct glassware, the exact mol to mol ratios of ingredients and perfect timing are needed.
I've made
- caramel twice - tasted right, wrong consistency.
- chocolate covered toffee over almonds - huge disaster - tasted good, looked bad, wrong consistency.
- pineapple fudge (no actual chocolate, just the consistency of fudge with pineapple flavor) this recipe turned out and tastes good. very very sugary
- and this week i produced a simple marshmello fudge (chocolate flavor) which worked.

So i guess I can make the fudges so far. The other candies require stopping cooking at the "soft ball" "hard ball" "firm ball" stage and i think these are ridiculous names.