Week Six: Toffee Strawberries

I shouldn't have laughed when I was watching "My Kitchen Rules" this week when the QLD contestants were getting their toffee terribly wrong, time after time.

I should have known that I was tempting fate!

They certainly look good.

Water? Check! Sugar? Check! All I need to get this week is strawberries. Unlucky for me they now seem to be out of season and cost an arm and a leg. Hrmm. 

But they look good! I picked a punnet with some smallish strawberries, so there was more to go around. 

Washed and ready to go. 

Now we get into the fun part, making the toffee. I was really nervous about this because I've heard horror stories of burning saucepans, blistered fingers, and setting off smoke detectors with a charred, hickory tasting mess. Apparently the "golden brown" colour specified in the recipe can very quickly turn into "THROW OUT THE SAUCEPAN YOU IDIOT YOU BURNT EVERYTHING". Surely it can't be that bad? I remember my mum making me toffees for school fete's etc and I remember them being fine, although she did admit to a few toffee disasters, and even she was nervous about my toffee attempts today.

With this in mind, I was prepared to be vigilant with the toffee. When it started boiling 5 minutes after putting it on the heat,  I was over the moon! Yes! My toffee is ready! But why isn't it golden brown? I called in the toffee expert, and apparently I was a long way from the home stretch with the toffee. So I waited. And watched. 

And watched some more. Actually I did a lot of meditating whilst watching this toffee, the bubbles were hypnotic and 30 mins flew past. After this amount of time I finally saw some colour in the syrupy mix! 

Time to start dipping! The instructions said use tongs but I didn't want the hassle of trying to clean hard toffee off our stainless steel tongs, and the ones with silicone on them, well it seemed a little stupid to dip those in boiling hot sugar (a lesson some of the masterchef contestants should have known!) 

Its true, its amazing how quickly it turned from light golden to this colour. Even though I had turned off the heat, it very quickly started to turn into a burnt mess. Any longer and I would have been in trouble. I actually like the toffee that's just on the edge and this one was fine by my standards. 

So the strawberries were dipped and placed on baking paper to dry. The dipping was so much fun, and the smell was amazing. But then I had all this toffee left over, so it was time to get creative! 

Attempted toffee bananas. Tasted good but the toffee had difficulty sticking to the banana and wasn't as firm as the toffee on the strawberries. 

By this time the toffee was getting pretty thick, and we tried to make some spun toffee but it was too firm for that. A quick look in the cupboard and we rustled up some nuts and made a quick praline! 

Going to crush it, maybe put it on icecream or just eat it as is. 

So the toffee wasn't a disaster, but it wasn't as quick as I had expected it to be, it actually took quite a while for the mix to turn to toffee. And you have to be careful, as even when you take it off the heat it is still super hot and cooking away, so you really want to pull it off just as it starts to go brown. Toffee is good for all sorts of things and so I'm glad I practiced it, might come in handy one day should I have to make the good ol' toffees for a school fete!