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The Toffifee – like the After Eight and the Bendicks Mint it seems to be one of those sweets that only makes its appearance during the festive period, although if you’re lucky you may still see a few boxes sitting on the shelves of your local Poundstretcher during January.
Making a giant Toffifee ought to be easy: nougat and hazelnut in a toffee-caramel cup, topped off with a blob of chocolate, but like so many other ambitious pimping projects little did we know that upscaling the Toffifee to our version “The Daddifee” would cause problems leading to disaster.
The most important part of making the Daddifee was getting the caramel cup right. Working with liquid toffee is a tricky prospect. Toffee solidifies at a much higher temperature than chocolate and so shaping it is a challenge – most plastic moulds were out of the question as they would quickly melt. After much debate we decided on sandwiching the liquid toffee between two glass mixing bowls with the inner bowl raised on a small stand cut out of a tin can.
As the toffee set it would take on the shape of the narrow space between the bowls. After that it would be a simple matter of spooning in hazelnut chocolate (we used Nutella) and capping the all-conquering confection with a disc of cooking chocolate shaped in a baking tin.
In place of the Toffifee’s single hazelnut (and in the spirit of keeping everything to scale) we decided to have a cluster of around 30 hazelnuts stuck together with toffee. Finding blanched hazelnuts in the middle of Northumbria was impossible so we had to buy normal ones. Roasting them to remove the skin didn’t really work and we ended up peeling most of them.
Using a kitchen thermometer the toffee was heated to hard boiling temperature (120 degrees C) and poured into the outer bowl. A slightly smaller mixing bowl was then placed inside and pushed down, squeezing hot toffee into the gap, and was held in place until the toffee had set. Pages: 1 2 |
