Pumpkin Seed Brittle

Sugar pumpkin seeds are very good for roasting, especially if they are taken from a pumpkin that is a little on the green side. Their shells are softer, and less woody, than the seeds of a Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin. When roasted, they're a lot like eating shelled sunflower seeds (at least that's what we've found).

And, this year, we also discovered they work quite nicely in place of peanuts in a brittle candy. It's another idea we picked up from the September/October 2009 addition of Tea Time Magazine, that we received back in July. Since, I let the children cut the magazine apart for our collage letters, before I remembered to save the recipes, we used the Betty Crocker recipe for peanut brittle instead.

The seeds don't add much in the way of crunchiness to the candy, like peanuts would, but they infuse it with a pumpkin taste, that is quite pleasing. We used about 2/3 cup of raw seeds, for a half batch of the brittle recipe, just slipping them in where the recipe called for peanuts.

I might suggest using an entire cup of seeds, for a little better seed to candy ratio. And, once the candy is ready, it needs to be removed from the heat very quickly, because the seeds burn easily. Besides that, it's exactly like making peanut brittle, but with a nice fall twist.

It's great to be a homeschooler.