Dear Santa, Please send candy thermometer

and maybe a new digital camera??

I've always wanted to make toffee. I finally looked online and found a recipe to try.
It took 4 sticks of butter and 2 cups of sugar.
Everything was going well, I was stirring for over 10 minutes. The directions said it may take 30.
SO I wasn't expecting it to burn all of a sudden.
I turned the stirring over to Katie while I got the pan ready and turned around.... and bam it went from light brown toffee color to this dark reddish color. I dripped some in a glass of water and tasted it and it was terribly burnt!
I don't have a candy thermometer so I was going by sight and water testing.

I didn't help that I forgot the almonds in the toaster oven and they burnt too. I was off to a rough start.
Luckily my caramel corn was doing awesome in the oven.

My camera did something weird and didn't finish the picture or I turned it off too fast.
It didn't even register the next couple pics of the caramel corn.

So I made another batch of toffee. Determination to succeed. This time I used 1/2 the butter and sugar. It has hazelnuts in it and on on top since I was out of almonds.

I made the caramel corn with double the popcorn, so it came out lightly covered.
Now I think you can eat twice as much!

I didn't know the camera didn't get my pics of the corn in the pans, so here's a pic the next day of the caramel corn in the ziploc bag! Hey at least there was some left the next day to take a picture of!!