Nuts are supposed to be good for you and all … and I suppose they don’t lose any of their virtue if they’re candied, right?
A friend gave us a large bag of walnuts, saying that they didn’t know what to do with them. So, we took them home and did some thinking. We thought that if we were to candy them then we’d be able to share. Yes. That’s what we thought. They never made it out of the house.
The “recipe” for candied walnuts isn’t really all that deep. The one thing which made the real difference in flavor? That’d be having blanched the walnuts in boiling water first, to remove the tannins from the skin of the meat. It turned the water a nasty brownish color, and the walnuts ended up quite pale in color. From there, it was a matter of letting them dry & mixing up some caramel.
For the caramel, we added some molasses (1/4 cup), sugar (2 cups), water (1/8 cup), and spices (cayenne pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, salt) to a pot and let it go until it was well above the Hard Ball stage, to 265 degrees Fahrenheit. Take it off the heat at this point and carefully add in about 1 tsp vanilla extract. Then just dump the sugar over the nuts in a large bowl, mix until coated, dump out on parchment, and wait. After a couple of hours the caramel will have sugared out a bit, leaving you with something almost the consistency of maple sugar coating the nuts.
Cayenne pepper makes them quite addictive. Don’t leave it out, and don’t be chicken about it, either. We think that it’s what kept these from being gifts … and we’re glad that we don’t get walnuts all that often!
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Maybe it’s just as well that the cashews didn’t turn out… too many nuts, not enough jogging!