Cinnamon "Candy Coated" Nuts
 

Saturday I made the most awesome candy-coated almonds. I cannot stop eating them. They have a really crunchy hard-candy shell and are dusted with cinnamon/Splenda. Here's the "recipe," with the amounts left very much up to your own personal taste:

Hil's Cinnamon-Splenda Nuts
Salted butter
Xylitol
Cinnamon
Splenda
A shaker full of cinnamon/Splenda mixture
Plain nuts (although I think salted might be good too). I used almonds.

Melt the butter in a large skillet, when it's just melted, stir in some xylitol and cinnamon until the mixture is a bit thick and tastes sweet enough to you. Salt is a good addition also because I like the sweet-salty combo, but that's optional. Let the mixture boil and cook down a bit until it's rather syrupy, then stir in enough nuts so there's just a bit of a syrup puddle left in the pan. Cook them a minute or two, stirring. Turn the nuts out onto some aluminum foil (they will be very sticky). Let cool a minute or two, but no longer.

Dump some nuts (or all of them if your bowl is big enough) into a bowl with a lid, or a big Ziploc bag. Dump in a lot, and I mean a lot, of the cinnamon-Splenda mixture. Shake to coat the nuts. Break up the stuck-together ones with a fork, dump in more cinnamon/Splenda, and shake again. Keep breaking up chunks, adding more and shaking until every nut is individually coated and non-sticky. Pour out onto clean foil to harden completely (takes a few hours).

This reminded me in a way of making "puppy chow," you know the Chex cereal coated in chocolate/peanut butter and then tossed with powdered sugar til it's dry and coated. The nuts harden with a very crunchy shell and they're absolutely delicious! And much easier than this recipe makes it sound, I promise.

NOTE: Yes, I do think using xylitol in this recipe is important. You can try it with just Splenda, but the xylitol is what makes the syrup thicken and creates the hard-candy coating. Splenda just won't do that. Might still be sweet, but it will be much thinner and won't coat the nuts nearly as well. I ordered my xylitol from netrition.com ages ago; it measures cup-for-cup like sugar or splenda does so it's easily used in recipes. I would think any other polyol would work just as well, if you have it.

I've done something similar but I use Erythritol rather than Xylitol.
They're insanely good.

I just melt the E. in the butter, toss in the nuts, salt. Let them get roasted and then cool.

Now I'm trying to figure out if I could throw in some cocoa powder in place of the cinnamon, to make a chocolate-coated version. Hmmm....

I had read somewhere someone does this with coconut oil too. It sounds pretty easy so Iam going to give it a try.

I tried this tonight with the CO and Malitol. It was a good way to get some more CO in. Very good.

I’m wondering how much cinnamon to use for these things. How much cinnamon per cup of sugar substitute would you recommend? Anybody? I know this is a very old thread.