Almond Roca

This is a great treat for Valentines Day. It’s really easy to make and inexpensive for large batches. 2 Cups Sugar
2 Cups Almond Slices (or Slivers) – You can also do this with Pecans!
1 cup butter (2 sticks – not margarine)
1 cup chocolate chips

Line a jelly roll pan with parchment paper and give it a quick rub down with a little butter. Then throw the rest of the butter, the sugar, and the almonds into a sauce pan on medium to medium high heat. Cook, stirring now and then, until it’s a rich caramel color and the ingredients are well blended — “soft crack” stage if you’ve got a candy thermometer, but I didn’t and it turned out fine. Pour it in the jelly roll pan, spreading it out quickly (dont’ worry if it doesn’t go edge-to-edge) and cutting score marks with a knife to form 1-1.5″ pieces. It hardens quickly so dont’ worry if you can’t cut all the way through. Then, while it’s still hot, sprinkle the chocolate chips over it all. Give them a minute to begin to melt, then spread them into a thin layer.

Throw the whole pan in the freezer for about 20 minutes (just to speed the cooling process) then you can lift it neatly from the parchment and break it along the score lines into about 70-90 pieces, depending on how thin you spread it and how big the pieces are.

Here’s the kicker. Each of the 90 pieces of candy has about 60 calories in it. It’ll store nicely in an airtight container, as long as you put that container in a place cool enough to keep your chocolate from melting, assuming you hide it well. Oh, and if you’ve got several pieces that didn’t turn out quite right (broken edges or whatever) instead of gobbling them like I did, you can break them into bits and keep them for ice cream toppping… mmmmmmm!