Crock pot Cinnamon Almonds

Down on the boardwalk there is a little shop that sells cinnamon-sugared nuts. While the rest of my family gravitates toward rides, or mini-golf, or fudge, I head straight for this store. It used to be bigger, and sold all kinds of old-fashioned candy as well, but this year, they cut back, I guess it was the economy, and the large space they had once occupied is now a haunted house/freak show attraction. I almost missed the place, now tucked away between T-Shirt Paradise (which also sells hermit crabs) and the freak show. It’s now just an elderly lady in a tiny sliver of a block-long building; all that they have left are the nuts. I hope she’s there next summer…

Anyway, recently, I came across a recipe for cinnamon-sugared almonds that can be made in a crock pot. The photo on Pinterest looks like this:

Ingredients:

1 1/2 C. Sugar
1 1/2 C. Brown Sugar
3 Tbsp. Cinnamon
1/8 tsp. Salt
1 Egg White
2 tsp. vanilla
3 Cups Almonds
1/4 C. Water

In a medium sized bowl, mix together sugars, cinnamon, and salt. Set aside. In another medium sized bowl, whisk the egg white and vanilla until it’s a little frothy. Add almonds. Make sure the almonds are thoroughly coated in the egg white mixture. Add cinnamon mixture to the almonds and toss until coated.

Thoroughly spray with the stoneware of your crock pot with non-stick cooking spray and add the mixture of almonds and sugars.

Cook on low ( with the lid on) 3-4 hours stirring every 20 minutes. In the last hour, add the 1/4 C. of water and stir well. This ensures a crunchy yummy coating. (*make sure after you’ve added the water that you continue to cook the nuts for another 45 minutes to an hour.)

You have to stir really well, especially as it gets later in the cooking process.

Line a baking sheet with parchment and spread the almonds flat to cool. The almonds will be sticky at this point, so make sure you separate them a little and have no large mounds.

 

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First, I assembled the sugars, cinnamon and salt in a medium-sized bowl.

Then, I put the egg white and vanilla together,

whisking until the mixture was frothy.

The almonds were added next, and stirred until they were evenly coated.

Then I began adding the cinnamon and sugar mixture, but when it seemed like all of the nuts were thoroughly coated,

I still had a lot of cinnamon and sugar.

But I figured it was best to follow the recipe, so I incorporated everything.

Then I sprayed the crock pot with Pam, and loaded in the almonds.

These were stirred every twenty minutes, and then in the last hour, I added the water.

After about three and a half hours, I removed the nuts from the pot, and laid them to cool on some wax paper.

There was a lot of sugar, so the nuts had to be broken apart by hand after they had cooled. And there was a lot of sugar-cinnamon left on the paper.

These nuts are delicious! I would even go so far as to say that they are almost as good as the ones I love from the boardwalk. It took a day or two for them to get extra crunchy. They would be great for a party or as gifts around the holidays.  I think when I do them again though, I might use about half of the cinnamon and sugar that the recipe calls for, because it seemed like a lot of it went to waste.