Peanut Butter Toffee Crunch Bars (Butterfingers using leaf croquant)
from https://lagustasluscious.wordpress.com/

Take my recipe—PLEASE! (How to make your own Butterfingers!) They cannot call them Butterfingers so they settled on Peanut Butter Toffee Crunch Bars.

Butterfingers made with Leaf Croquant: Have you ever made croissants? If so, you’ll have a slight jump on this recipe, which is basically the croissant-making technique (puff pastry) crossed with molten hot sugar that requires you to work superfast. It’s a technique called leaf croquant, if you wanna get technical about it.

Make your filling.

400 grams peanut butter. We use organic, salted, smooth pb.
60 grams confectioners’ sugar
30 grams cane syrup. You could use glucose syrup or corn syrup or probably even brown rice syrup or agave syrup.

Melt pb in a bowl in a double boiler. Add sugar (sift it in) and syrup and knead until malleable and smooth. Form into a square 10” x 10”. Keep warm in oven.

Make your caramel. This is a dry caramel. It takes a bit o’ practice, but it’s a fun technique.

1/4 tsp lemon juice
450 grams sugar
60 grams cane syrup (see above)

Rub lemon juice into sugar. Make a dry caramel by cooking, stirring slowly but constantly, until sugar is evenly melted and becomes a medium amber color (about 10 minutes. Sugar will not be perfectly dissolved and smooth when the color is medium amber, but if you keep cooking it to try to get it perfectly smooth it will burn and you won’t realize it until later. This is hard to explain.). Turn heat to low, add syrup (it will bubble up, and if you’ve burnt it you’ll realize it now because it will get really dark.), and stir until emulsified.

Pour caramel into a 12” x 12” square on a silicone baking mat (a Silpat) or parchment paper on a full size sheet pan. (DO NOT SKIP THE STEP OF PUTTING DOWN PARCHMENT OR SOMETHING BETWEEN THE CARAMEL AND THE SHEET PAN! I can’t even imagine what fresh hell you’d be into then, trying to scrape magma-like sugar off your sheet pan for the next hour or so.)

Place the square of pb filling onto one end of the caramel, leaving approximately 1” on all sides. Or thereabouts.

Fold mat and caramel over the filling to enclose it.

Peel mat off and tightly seal edges of the caramel to envelop filling.

Put sheet pan in a 200°F oven as necessary to keep warm. You’ll know when to put it in the oven—when it starts driving you crazy and hardening up and cracking, like this:

When it comes out of the oven, the caramel will sometimes get so melty that it spills over, like this. That’s OK. Just work fast.

Roll slab into a thin rectangle then fold into thirds.

Roll slab to 1/2 ” thick, to a 12” x 12” square. Fold into thirds again. You’ve done one turn. Repeat steps to do four more turns, putting the sheet pan in the oven as necessary in order to make the dough workable.

Obviously, working as quickly as possible will make your life a lot easier. But try not to burn yourself with all this business of taking pans in and out of the oven and handling super hot sugar dough. Oh, and around the second to third turn, your arms will start really aching. This dough is really hard to roll out, what can I say.

After the fourth turn, cut the 12” x 12” sheet into 3 rows by 8 rows, to make 24 bars.

[Stella Parks has a recipe for Butterfingers on https://www.seriouseats.com/ which uses molasses and cornflakes. She says you should “crumb coat” the candy bars before dipping in chocolate. Her bars are extremely flaky and this holds them together for dipping. Do this by tempering 12 ounces of chocolate. Drizzle or pipe a thin line of chocolate onto the bottom of each candy piece and then flip each over to form a foot on the bottom. Next, drizzle a little chocolate over each bar and use a small pastry brush to evenly coat the bar in a thin layer of chocolate. Let the chocolate set. This may be necessary here. Not sure because I have never made them.]

Dip into tempered chocolate.