You can show your family and friends that you truly care about them by giving them your own homemade chocolate candy bars.
Just as a side note, of course, the happy recipients are certain to be impressed _ stunned, actually _ and grateful.
Why grateful? Because these things are truly, truly good.
"Your Snickers are better than actual Snickers," said one taste-tester.
"Your Twix are better than actual Twix," said another.
I made homemade knockoffs of several popular chocolate candy bars. As is so often the case, homemade is better than the commercial versions, or at least as good. But I have to admit that, in this case, homemade is also more expensive and more time-consuming than going to the local 7-Eleven and grabbing a Kit Kat bar.
Except Kit Kat bars. Making your own Kit Kat bars is surprisingly fast and easy and cheap.
There are two secrets. Secret No. 1 is important _ nearly necessary _ for making any candy bar at home: Don't use regular chocolate; use chocolate candy coating. Chocolate, after it melts and hardens, turns brittle and fails to adhere to whatever you are trying to coat. Candy coating, on the other hand, is softer and makes the perfect exterior for any confection.
You can find chocolate candy coating, also called melting wafers, in the baking aisle of most grocery stores (Wilton and Baker's are popular brands). You can get the same effect by tempering regular chocolate, but it takes a long time and requires a fairly high degree of precision. For home cooks, I don't recommend it.
Secret No. 2 only concerns Kit Kat bars: They are ridiculously easy. You know those sugar wafers you can get at any store? Dip them in melted chocolate candy coating. Congratulations, you have Kitty Kat bars.
I next tried something much harder, faux Butterfingers bars called Nutterfingers. The hard part comes in creating that distinctive crunchy peanut-butter filling in the middle.
Even so, all it takes is patience, and then speed. The patience part comes when you bring a boiling mixture of sugar, water and corn syrup to 300 degrees. The temperature rises slowly, and it stops altogether at 220 degrees for a couple of minutes until it begins creeping upward again.
Then comes the speed part. When it hits 300 degrees, you immediately dump in a mixture of peanut butter, vanilla extract and baking soda, and quickly stir to mix. Still acting fast, you spread this combination out onto a prepared baking dish before it can solidify and crumble.
I tried it twice, and both times I got some crumbling.
Then comes the patience part again. You have to wait at least four hours before you can coat the bars with chocolate. But it is definitely worth the wait. It is even worth the crumbling.
Homemade Almond Joy bars were next, which I am calling Almond Happiness. Ordinarily, I am not a fan of Almond Joy bars, but these are not ordinary.
They are extraordinary. The filling comes from a lot of sweetened, shredded coconut stirred into a mixture of condensed milk and powdered sugar, plus a hit of vanilla and salt. The only problem is that this filling is very tough to stir.
I've been working out. You're on your own.
You need toasted almonds, of course, for Almond Joy or Almond Happiness, and my almonds tended to fall off into the chocolate. But that's not too big of a problem. A few of my candies just became Hills bars.
I next made what I believe we can call Peanut Butter Cups. That's chocolate on the bottom, a just-right layer of peanut butter (mixed with powdered sugar and melted butter) in the middle and more chocolate on top.
These are slightly more difficult to make than they sound, but only slightly. Very slightly. When you pour the chocolate in the bottom of the cup for the first layer, you have to spread it around the edges. That's not hard, but the whole batch will take several minutes to do it. Feel free to use your finger to help do the spreading, as long as it is impeccably clean. Then add chocolate on top.
They taste every bit as wonderful as the real thing. You can just imagine all those workers in Hershey, Pa., using their impeccably clean fingers to spread chocolate around the edges.
Next, I made what are called Resolution Breaker bars, but which taste like Snickers bars (though, as we have seen, they are better). The trick here is to make a nougat, and the traditional way to make nougat is time-consuming and, frankly, a little annoying.
So I went with the nontraditional method featured in the recipe, which comes from Oh! Nuts. Timing is important here, too, because once you have a mixture of butter, sugar and evaporated milk boiling you quickly have to stir in a combination of peanut butter, vanilla and marshmallow creme.
Ordinarily, I stay away from marshmallow creme (or anything that spells it "creme"), but it makes sense when making nougat.
Resolution Breaker bars require several steps _ nougat, peanut-filled caramel and chocolate _ and so do bars I'm going to call Twicks. With Twicks bars, you begin with a cookie, but it is a fairly soft cookie so you use cake flour (a little less all-purpose flour will do, too).
A caramel layer is next, and although it involves melting and stirring and judging how much cream to add, the only hard part is unwrapping all those little caramels.
You have to refrigerate each layer as you make it, so it takes a little time. But anticipation only makes homemade candy bars better.
When you give them to your friends and relations, and their children, be sure to save a couple for yourself.
