Mon, Feb-02-09, 12:00
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Diet Cokeaholic
Posts: 15,793
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Plan: Whole foods moderation
Stats: 221/215/150
BF:
Progress: 8%
Location: Alabama
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Cinnamon "Candy Coated" Nuts
Saturday I made the most awesome candy-coated almonds. I cannot stop eating them. They have a really crunchy hard-candy shell and are dusted with cinnamon/Splenda. Here's the "recipe," with the amounts left very much up to your own personal taste:
Hil's Cinnamon-Splenda Nuts
Salted butter
Xylitol
Cinnamon
Splenda
A shaker full of cinnamon/Splenda mixture
Plain nuts (although I think salted might be good too). I used almonds.
Melt the butter in a large skillet, when it's just melted, stir in some xylitol and cinnamon until the mixture is a bit thick and tastes sweet enough to you. Salt is a good addition also because I like the sweet-salty combo, but that's optional. Let the mixture boil and cook down a bit until it's rather syrupy, then stir in enough nuts so there's just a bit of a syrup puddle left in the pan. Cook them a minute or two, stirring. Turn the nuts out onto some aluminum foil (they will be very sticky). Let cool a minute or two, but no longer.
Dump some nuts (or all of them if your bowl is big enough) into a bowl with a lid, or a big Ziploc bag. Dump in a lot, and I mean a lot, of the cinnamon-Splenda mixture. Shake to coat the nuts. Break up the stuck-together ones with a fork, dump in more cinnamon/Splenda, and shake again. Keep breaking up chunks, adding more and shaking until every nut is individually coated and non-sticky. Pour out onto clean foil to harden completely (takes a few hours).
This reminded me in a way of making "puppy chow," you know the Chex cereal coated in chocolate/peanut butter and then tossed with powdered sugar til it's dry and coated. The nuts harden with a very crunchy shell and they're absolutely delicious! And much easier than this recipe makes it sound, I promise.
NOTE: Yes, I do think using xylitol in this recipe is important. You can try it with just Splenda, but the xylitol is what makes the syrup thicken and creates the hard-candy coating. Splenda just won't do that. Might still be sweet, but it will be much thinner and won't coat the nuts nearly as well. I ordered my xylitol from netrition.com ages ago; it measures cup-for-cup like sugar or splenda does so it's easily used in recipes. I would think any other polyol would work just as well, if you have it.
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