Almond Roca

1 lb. butter (4 sticks)
2 cups sugar (all granulated or 1 cup white, 1 cup brown)
2 Tbs. light corn syrup
6 Tbs. water
1 cups almonds, finely chopped
12 oz. bag of semi-sweet morsels (or half a bag and 6 Hershey bars)

Melt butter over medium-high heat.
Add sugar, corn syrup, and water. Stir to incorporate
Bring to light boil over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally.
Put that candy thermometer in and stir it until it reaches 290 degrees.
Remove from heat.
Stir in 1/2 cup almonds.
Pour mixture onto parchment-lined pan. Allow to cool completely.
Melt chocolate in microwave at 20-second intervals, stirring every 20 seconds.
When bottom layer is cool, spread chocolate on top and sprinkle with almonds.
Allow to cool and break into candy pieces.

Honorable mentions and better candy makers:
http://www.chef-in-training.com/2014/04/homemade-almond-roca/#comment-63384

Copycat Almond Roca

To make the cookie version without the extra drama:
1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar (or mix of white and brown)
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup cocoa powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup almonds, finely chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Whip softened butter with sugar.
Add eggs and vanilla.
In separate bowl, mix together dry ingredients.
Add dry ingredients to mixer a little at a time until completely mixed.
Add almonds.
Scoop onto parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

How the candy-making experience was not so sweet

Our customers continued to …. challenge us.
Not only were we asked to alter ingredients, which in some cases worked out marvelously, but we were asked to add dishes. Everyday. All day. Now this is a good thing, actually. It means people liked what we made and trusted us to make things their mamas used to make.
In the first few weeks of these requests, we got a tad aggravated. This was because we were just barely keeping ahead of the overwhelming task of keeping the place stocked with food. But as we practiced our patient smiles and long-suffering response of, “Yes, that’s a good idea,” because you can’t say, “I’ve been here 14 hours already and it’s noon and you’re crazy,” we realized that a lot of requests were actually good ideas.
Enter yet another “helpful” customer who only occasionally stopped by to purchase a $3.00 item. I mention this because when a customer is “good” or “great,” they stop by often or purchase lots of something, or both. These customers are often the ones we would work harder to please or for whom we’d go the extra mile. That’s just the way it is. So, we listened with half an ear to all the suggestions of those who rarely came in. Before this seems totally unfair and awful, let me explain that in the very beginning, we didn’t know who our best customers would be; and so we tried hard, basically bent over backwards, to please everyone and try everything everyone told us. After about a month of putting these “ideas” on our shelves with no one purchasing them and the suggestor never returning (or reading their daily e-mail update) to see that we had taken their advice, we stopped trying every. new. idea.
Now this lovely lady who waltzed in with her $3.00 asked us to make a candy her mom used to buy.
“What was it?” I asked as I gave her the change from her $5.00.
“It was called almond roca,” as she went on to explain how much she and her mom loved it.
“Do they not make it anymore?” I’d never heard of it and I wondered why she didn’t just buy some.
“I can’t find it around here. But it’s so delicious. The ingredients seem so simple. I bet it’d be super easy to make,” she said helpfully.
For those who don’t cook or bake or ever even enter a kitchen to tell others what’s easy is, well, ridiculous.
I took a deep breath, forced a smile and said, “I’ll have to look that up.”
She smiled sweetly and left.
That evening, as I was preparing our schedule for the following day, I decided I might just see what that candy was all about. I do love a challenge. And I do love candy.
Almond Roca, according to Wikipedia, is “a brand of chocolate-covered, almond butter crunch, hard toffee with a coating of ground almonds. It is similar to chocolate-covered English toffee. The candy is manufactured by the Brown & Haley Co. of Tacoma, Washington, founded in 1914 by Harry Brown and J.C. Haley.”
I googled how to make it and found a recipe I decided to try the next day. Why not? It would give us something extra for our shelves and a nice draw as the candy was unavailable in our town. I knew I had an extra 15 minutes somewhere in the day. The recipe seemed straightforward and not complicated. Maybe that chick was right, it’d be easy.
So I combined two recipes I found, with ingredients that were almost identical. One required a candy thermometer and one did not. I did not have a candy thermometer because we were not candy makers. JoAnn, Rebecca, and Sue all thought I might need that thermometer, but I figured winging it would work.
After I followed directions from the second recipe and boiled the mixture to a constant bubble, but not a rolling boil ( I know, what?), I poured it into a parchment-lined pan and set it aside to work on the chocolate topping. I started pouring the chocolate onto the toffee mixture, and watched it sink. Glancing up, I saw all three of my cohorts furrow their brows and button their lips.
I put the mixture in the fridge and waited about an hour to try again. This time the chocolate stayed on top of the toffee, and so I let it cool in the fridge for another hour. I began cutting it into bars and watched the toffee mixture ooze all over the place as the weight of the chocolate squished it down. I glanced up to see if anyone else saw this. Of course they did. We were all working at our central tables mixing and packaging. They all half-grinned. JoAnn offered helpfully, “Looks like we could’ve used a candy thermometer.”
I nodded. Yes, yes, it does.
The ingredients used for this failure were costly and I’d used them in abundance. So I couldn’t just let it go to waste. And eating all of that yummy oozing goodness myself was an delicious but unreasonable option, so I decided to make the proverbial lemonade from lemons.
The ingredients were similar to those in a cookie. So I added flour and baking soda and a bit of salt along with eggs.
That lovely customer did have a helpful suggestion. And though she never called or checked her e-mail update or came back to see if we tried her idea, she was a “good” customer. She had prompted the birth of the almond roca cookie.