Soda Cracker Candy

Need a break from the end-of-the-year crunch? Perhaps a little snack will cheer you up! Soda Cracker Candy is amazing, and the ratio of taste-to-work is way up there: it’s hard to find an easier candy/bar cookie that tastes as good. And they have chocolate in them. And they’re mathy: they’re made from saltines, and saltines are squares. How’s that for a justification?

Soda Cracker Candy
1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 package or so of saltines or other soda cracker
1 12 oz. bag chocolate chips
Optional: almonds, other nuts, candy cane pieces, etc.

There is a lot of flexibility in this. The butter and crackers can be salted or unsalted; the chocolate can be milk or semisweet. Plus, I’ve seen other versions of this around the internet and the ratio of butter & sugar to cracker to chocolate seems to vary with no harm done.

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Take a jelly roll pan or cookie sheet with edges (size is flexible) and line it with foil so the foil come up a bit at the edges. Place a single layer of saltines down, avoiding gaps as much as possible. You might need to break up crackers to try to fill in the gaps if your pan-width isn’t an integer multiple of cracker-width, or you might decide that that is way too much work.

Melt the butter with the brown sugar until it is boiling, stirring regularly. (You can let it boil a couple minutes here and it will form a harder caramel.) Pour this mixture over the saltines, and then carefully put the pan in the oven. The saltines may float up on the liquid a bit, but that’s OK. After about 8 minutes, turn off the oven, remove the pan, and sprinkle chocolate chips on the top [you might not use the entire bag, depending on the size of your pan]. Return the pan to the still-warm oven for a couple minutes to let the chocolate soften, then remove it and spread the chocolate around the top. Add the optional ingredients.

Let the pan cool, and then place it in the fridge or freezer to harden. Once it’s hard enough, you can break off pieces of any size or shape, or slam the whole thing onto a counter and let it shatter. The pieces won’t break into nice squares, but they’ll still taste just as good!

Tags: candy, Food, saltines