This week's date night was a taste roller coaster! I had a Groupon for a local restaurant, El Rincon Criollo. It's a little Cuban restaurant, with interior decoration that's so tacky it's kinda endearing, friendly servers, and more importantly, yummy food! I'm a sucker for garlic, so was loving the garlic chicken - tender & soft on the inside, yet crispy on the outside. Hubby got the chef's special, and also thoroughly enjoyed it, though I wasn't a fan of the green pepper flavor. Yum yum yum!! Plus, with the Groupon, it ended up being a super cheap meal, costing us ~$25 total. :-)
After dinner, we headed home for some more food fun - candy making! See, one of Hubby's favorite candy bars growing up in South Africa is a "Crunchie", which is chocolate covered honeycomb. They're hard to find in the US, though you can usually find them in specialty shops for a premium price. Thankfully, a few weeks ago we recently discovered that there's plenty of recipes online to reproduce this deliciousness!!! So, after weeding through number recipes for "Honeycomb", "Hokey Pokey", "Violet Crumble", "Sponge Toffee", and a slew of other names, we picked an easy sounded recipe, and embarked on our first candy making adventure!
Mixing up the honey, sugar, & corn syrup
Watching the mixture boil up, and hit 300 degrees
Mix in baking soda, and suddenly the mix starts foaming
up & taking up the entire pot!
Pouring the toffee mixture into a pan for cooling
ooooh, time to lick the pot!
that's a big hunk of Crunchie bar!!
Breaking it up into bite sized pieces
Finished product covered in white & regular chocolate (*drool*)
Inside of the final product - honeycomb!
The verdict - pretty darn good! The honeycomb is a bit overcooked (first time with a candy thermometer, so we were having troubles figuring out how to place it for proper measurement), but the verdict from everyone we've given it to is "YUM!!!". So, think that the taste sensations of this week's date night were a grand success! :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment