Pimp That Snack

Almond Joy

by Chad and Lauren 8 photos Rated 71% 117 votes when voting closed

For our pimp project, we decided to pimp up our favorite coconut candy bar: Almond Joy! First we have the goods, along with two sample candy bars. One for us to snack on, the other to compare with at the end.

Ingredients heaped in a blue baking dish, two normal-sized Almond Joy bars in front

To make a creamy, coconutty center we melted down three sticks of butter (!), added a can of condensed milk, a tiny bit of vanilla, and finally the coconut. Look how gloppy it is! It looks like oatmeal. It seemed too yellow and too liquidy, but we figured a little refridgeration would help that.

Broken chocolate chunks melting in a pan on the hob beside a pale coconut mixture

The chocolate portion was pretty much just melted chocolate, but to make it extra bad for you we added a little bit of shortening, for good measure. We poured and spread the melted chocolate into a pan to refridgerate. Initially we thought we would use only about a third of the mixture, but later decided more chocolate was better. We ended up needing to melt down an extra bag of chocolate in order to cover the top of the candy. Both the coconut filling and the spread chocolate went in the fridge to harden.

Spreading a base layer of melted chocolate across a parchment-lined glass baking dish

It’s not called almond joy for nothing! Almonds toasted and ready!

Whole almonds spread across a metal baking tray ready for toasting

A couple hours later, the coconut is ready to go on the chocolate base. It still seemed slightly too liquidy, but wasn’t warm anymore, which has to count for something. We just sort of mushed it into formation and then set the almonds on top. We had wanted it to look like the original candy bar with the two almonds. Being that they don’t grow almonds the size of pineapple, we had to just group the almonds together in order to imitate a large almond look.

Two coconut slabs laid on the chocolate base, each topped with clusters of whole almonds

Of course, pouring the still very warm chocolate over the coconut wasn’t a good idea and mushed everything together in the middle. The almonds also sort of lost their formation and turned the whole thing into what looked like a Mounds candy. Oh well, back to the fridge!

Melted chocolate poured from a bowl over the almond-topped coconut slabs in the dish

After several hours, it seemed ready to come out of the fridge for good. We split it into two pieces. Almond Joy has two pieces per package, so we wanted to imitate that aspect as well. Cutting the chocolate apart was interesting and sort of difficult. And finally, the cross section photo, which unfortunately came out slightly blurry. The most important part of this project was, of course, the taste test! Ours tastes better! The comparison candy found itself in the trash after we ate part of ours. We think the original tastes like too much fake coconut. Our friends agree, who gladly helped us eat it the next following days.

The two finished chocolate-coated bars, each filling a whole dinner plate

The giant bar cut open on a baking tray, showing its thick white coconut filling

This project cost us about $17.00 and thousands of calories.
Melted, Fridged, and Submitted by: Chad and Lauren

Nutritional info:

Original:

Calories: 220
Fat : 12g
Sat. Fat : 8g
Carbs. : 27g
Fiber : 2g
Protein: : 2g

Calcium: 2%
Iron : 2%

Pimped:

Calories: 10050
Fat : 735g
Sat. Fat : 436.5g
Carbs. : 842g
Protein: : 66g

Vit. A : 212%
Vit. E : 30%
Calcium: 148%
Iron : 232%

More like this