Spicy Honey Roasted Peanuts

Recently while cleaning out my pantry, I found two plastic boxes filled with peanuts. Suddenly all kinds of peanuts recipes started running through my mind. I could make peanut soup, peanut cupcakes, peanuts brittle, peanut chikkis the possibilities seemed endless.

The decision to make Spicy Honey Roasted Peanuts was made by my husband. He loves these kind of peanuts to snack on and thought it would be great if we could make some at home. So I adapted this recipe from allrecipes.com. The results were amazing, these taste just as good as the store bought ones. Next time I will vary it a bit and make Spicy Masala Peanuts.

Makes about 2 cups

Ingredients

2 cup peanuts, roasted but unsalted ( you can use unroasted / raw  nuts too )
2 + 1 tbsp white granulated sugar
1 tsp cayenne / red chilli powder / lal mirchi powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1 tbsp butter, salted ( can use unsalted too )
1 tbsp honey
1/2 tsp sea salt ( can substitute with table salt )


Method

• Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Place the rack in the centre of the oven.
• In a small bowl, mix together the 2 tbsp of sugar, 1 tsp of cayenne and 1/4 tsp of garlic powder.
• In a medium saucepan heat the butter, honey, sea salt and 1 tbsp of sugar till it all get bubbly and frothy.
• Remove from the heat and add the peanuts and mix thoroughly till the peanuts are coated with the honey butter mixture. Grease an 8 inch cake pan and pour the nuts into the cake pan. Put into the preheated oven and let it bake for 16 minutes ( if you already started with roasted nuts ) or 30 minutes ( if the peanuts were unroasted / raw to begin with ).
• During baking using a spoon turn the nuts around every 5 minutes, so as to roast them evenly on all sides.
• Remove from the oven when the peanuts are fully roasted. Scrape the nuts out of the baking pan into a medium sized bowl.
• Add 1/3 of the sugar + cayenne mixture to the nuts and toss the nuts in it. Add the rest of the sugar + cayenne in two more batches and keep tossing it to coat all the peanuts. Cool it and store in a jar at room temperature.