A perfect snack with festive drinks. Why choose between sweet or salty nuts when you can have them both, with the added bonus of delicious spices. This Christmas Nut Mix brings all of these flavours together in perfect harmony, and you can make them in 15 minutes or less.
At Christmas time we normally hunt for the nutcracker, which is either broken or worse still, lost forever, and this normally happens on the day you are serving your beautiful bag of nuts in their shells to a host of family and friends. There's always frantic digging around in THAT drawer in your kitchen that keeps everything that is hardly ever used, but you can't throw away, because you may use something in there one day. And sure as nuts, Christmas is the day you need that something, and its not there. Well forget about that nutcracker, you won't need one for these shelled raw nuts that you can toast in minutes and spice up to make your Christmas drinks more festive.
We all know that smell can affect a persons's mood, and what better way to bring in the holiday spirit than with your home filled with the irresistible aroma of Christmas spices. I used Mild and Spicy Curry Powder, Cumin, Cinnamon and a touch of Cloves for the spices, and a small amount of sugar to give the sweet caramelized crunch to the nuts.
The spice combination is perfect with a total of 600g of nuts. I have found that if you add more nuts there is not enough spice/sugar to coat them fully. I would suggest making the nuts exactly as the recipe suggests, as a first attempt. See how you like the combination, if you prefer them a tad sweeter then with your next batch modify the recipe. Its easy to do - add more of the spices if you prefer, but I love how these amounts are not too overpowering, so you can still taste the nuts and not just a heap of sugar and spice.
I hope your festive season is everything you wish for.
