Macadamia Nut Brittle

What is it?

The brittle is the trick here, not the nut. Macadamia on its own is soft and buttery. That's pleasant, and it does very little in ice cream. Set it into cooked sugar and snap the sheet into pieces and it becomes the hardest thing in the tub. Boiled sugar also solves the storage problem. It's got almost no water in it, so it neither freezes nor softens, and it seals the nut inside it away from the ice cream that would otherwise turn it limp. Macadamia trees take the better part of a decade to bear, and the shell needs machinery to crack. That's why the nut turns up sparingly almost everywhere it appears.