Homemade Buttercrunch Candy

substitue brown sugar for a more caramel taste. I used butter and wouldn't even think of using margarine. is fabulous.

This recipe is in my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook and it has always been a successful one for me! I used butter, though - margarine is a bad idea for this recipe - it won't set up correctly and it will taste weird. I've made many diifferent batches of almond buttercrunch candy and this is the one I've had the best success with. It was perfect and delicious (btw, I did cook it to 300 and it came out the perfect consistency).

If you like the rich taste of toffee and chocolate, you'll love this. The only changes I made were that I used butter instead of margarine and I cooked it to 290-300 degrees instead of 270 degrees. I roasted my own almonds because I like a deeper flavor. If you have a candy thermometer this is a very easy recipe.

Cheap and easy to make. Great for gift giving. I did change the temperature to 290 degree f because when I cooked it to 270 is was not brittle enough and was a bit chewy. Delicious

I used Splenda and it did not work out at all. With real sugar, its a great treat!

I don't know if I am oversensitive to after tastes in vegetable oil products, or what...but this candy has a rancid slightly fishy taste to me from the margarine. I pick up this same taste in canola oil too. Is it just me? I am wondering if this candy can be made with real butter instead. I wanted to send this to some soldiers in Iraq...but I can't now. :-(

Well Julie, this is an absolutely fabulous recipe. We love it. I made a batch to add to some gift baskets I am making for Christmas gifts. I am going to make more tomorrow it is so good. I followed your recipe exactly except I cooked it until it reached 175 degrees only because I was doing two things at once and was not watching closely. The candy turned out perfect. What an easy recipe.Thanks for sharing Julie. Julie have you ever tried to double the recipe? Some things can sucessfully be doubled and some not. Please let me know it would save me some time. Thank you

This was easy to make and it tastes great. I used semi-sweet chips because it is what I have and it turned out very tasty. We might think I've wrecked the recipe if I go to milk chocolate next time. I've made this again to have on the munchie table for Christmas dinner so it has to be good. Thanks for an easy recipe!

This was not to my liking.

Beware! This recipe uses twice the fat (margarine in this case) as other recipes for butter crunch. This ratio of sugar:fat was a disaster for me. Wish I'd verified with other recipes first. The other recipes in books and online use butter and only 1/2 c.

love this recipe, used butter instead of margarine, boiled to 300 degrees & used peanuts instead of almonds. It was a huge hit!!

This is deliciously addictive (if made with butter). And as some other reviewers noted, it needs to be heated to at least 290 degrees. I found that at 270 it doesn't get crisp enough to break into pieces - still a bit gooey. With these changes, it deserves at least 5 stars!

This candy is great! It tastes just as good or even better than an expensive one my mother-in-law buys and sends us each year. I don't have a candy thermometer so I cooked it until it turned a light brown color and it was perfect. I THINLY spread the toffee layer on a cookie sheet cause I like a thin toffee layer and lots of chocolate. I used walnuts instead of almonds because that's what we like. I will be making this often. Thanks so much for the recipe!

My grandmother used to always make peanut brittle for Christmas. When she got too old to continue the tradition, my father took over. He passed away last year and I did not have the family brittle recipe to continue the tradition. This toffee is so wonderful. Without the chocolate it is so much like grandmas brittle. With the chocolate, it adds a personal twist as I LOVE chocolate. :) Thank you so much for helping me carry on our family's tradition! My mother says the base of this toffee tastes much better than grandmas brittle, which is quite a compliment as everyone anticipated grandmas brittle come Christmas. This is also really easy and my sister and I had so much fun making this, carrying on the tradition. I'll have to share this recipe with my cousins so they'll be able to carry the tradition too. Imagine the very yummiest peanut brittle ever (or cashew which is waft I used), now add melted Guittard milk chocolate over it. Delish! Guittard is more expensive than Tollhouse morsels but the chocolate flavor is much more intense. Even my husband who is not a big toffee or brittle fan loved this!

My family has used this recipe for over 30 years. DO NOT USE MARGARINE!!! It may be cheaper but it's even less healthy (transfats), and tastes like dooky. As far as the recipes using 1/2 c of butter? If you look, they make less candy and the texture is not at all the same. Way too hard.

I regularly use a different butter crunch recipe with butter not margarine and one must be mindful not to over mix or overheat when trying to caramelize the sugar because the butter will separate from the sugar and the final outcome is not as successful as it could be. As a result, I thought I would try to find a less temper mental recipe and decided to try this one. Since margarine is composed of oil and not milk solids it was difficult to caramelize the sugar because oil has a higher burning point than butter. At 270 degrees the margarine and butter blended well into a new solid but only reached a golden color not a toffee glow that I expected. When tasting the final product, the butter crunch was chewy after the first couple of chews and not a crunchy/brittle melt in your mouth texture that good crunches are. Though the final product looked great I could not achieve what the other reviewers could. Most reviewers said they switched out the margarine with butter. If using margarine I would do what one reviewer suggested and heat the mixture to 290 degrees to eliminate the chew but I do not know if the liquid margarine and sugar remains incorporated at the higher temperature or if the higher temp is the fix. I am too embarrassed to let anyone eat this chewy product. Maybe this recipe depends upon the quality of margarine and maybe each margarine needs to be heated to a different temperature. Too much science to figure out. Just stick with butter.