English Toffee

This is my grandmother's toffee.  I remember a few years ago being horrified at a good friend's great aunt refusing my toffee.  That had never happened before.  I was absolutely appalled.  Fortunately, her niece and rest of the family stepped in exclaiming the fabulousness of my toffee and crisis was averted.  I believe she took the rest of my toffee with her. :)  Not so long ago I discovered why she had refused my toffee.  There is a recipe going around that involves saltines, microwaving, and chocolate. I have tasted this toffee (as apparently had the great aunt) and to me it's gawdawful.  As my Aunt Sue says, once you have the real thing you never go back.

Now I understand that like many things, making candy requires time and patience; of which, both are in short supply these days.  Making toffee is not terribly difficult, once you get the hang of it.  Making toffee has even gotten easier over the years.  We have always made it with Land of Lakes salted butter, McCormick's vanilla, and Hershey's Milk Chocolate. - I tell you this because this is the way we do it, this is the taste I know and remember.  You are welcome to make it however you wish. - The Hershey's used to only come in bars and Kisses.  It is a PAIN (and much cussing is involved) in shaving a bar (one must shave with a sharp knife and not melt the chocolate in the process of shaving) or chopping down Kisses (you'd be amazed at how hard those suckers are) to the appropriate size for melting.  You can find (with some searching, it took me 5 stores this year) Hershey's milk chocolate bits/morsels, which work exceptionally well.

I believe I learned to cuss over the English Toffee recipe (just kidding Mom).  I distinctly remember (with a smile and a laugh) the many Christmases of making toffee with Mom, various aunts, and Grandma.  It often appears to be a 3-ring circus.  We'd start making the toffee, but no one would've gotten the walnuts chopped, which the toffee goes over.  Someone would have to chop them down and get enough of them spread correctly (thin layer, all parts of the pan covered) on the pan.  The walnuts were first chopped with a knife, then a nut grinder, someone tried a food processor (pulsing is best of you go that method, you don't want to end up with "flour"), I use a "quikchop chopper".

Toffee takes about 20 to 30 minutes on the stove, so you can imagine the rush in the earlier methods.  I was a kid and will always remember my mother and grandmother's "Stir! Stir! Keep stirring!! Whatever you do DON'T STOP!" while they rushed to do something else. I recommend a heavy bottom skillet/pot, non-stick or stainless steel doesn't really matter (be warned that on a non-stick it will slide out onto the nuts in a great rush).  I also recommend a candy thermometer.  I got mine at Wally World for about $2, it's not fancy, but it is short enough to go on pan/pot so I don't have to hold it and it's not so tall as to fall off the side of said pan/pot b/c there's not enough "side" to anchor it to.  You could I suppose grow a 3rd arm to hold on to the pot should you be so inclined. 

The idea is to reach "hard crack stage", which is just above 300F, on the candy thermometer.  To test that you've reached the hard crack stage, you take a little bit of candy and toss it in cold water, you should be able to hear it crackle and it will instantly turn hard.  You can also tell by color once you've done it enough, but I'm a fan of going with all three methods b/c it's a real shame to screw up toffee, not to mention it looks, smells and tastes bad (if you get it too hot).  Once you burn sugar let it go and start over.  If it's not hot enough, it won't set right and is just a big messy disappointment.  Yes, we've all experienced both.

So without further adieu, English Toffee making in pictures:

chopped walnuts to cover a little over 1/2 a jelly roll pan (or any pan w/ sides)

the only time you can probably get away with not stirring long enough to take a picture is when everything is melting and combining

Pour/spread the toffee over the nuts

Toss the chocolate chips on top and wait for them to heat and begin to melt

Spread chocolate over toffee and wait for all to harden

final product in a cookie tin (photo courtesy of Julia Huffman)

Candy Bar Cookies

I distinctly recall my mother telling me over the last couple of years the reason she never made these cookies was because they are a pain in the ... and because she could never make them the way my Aunt Jean did.  So yes, this is a recipe I found in my grandmother's box, but it really came from my Aunt Jean.  I did not know my aunt very well and certainly not as well as I would have liked.  She was the oldest daughter and my mother the youngest with about 16 years between them.  Grandma used to say she had two families because of the age gap.  My distinct memory is a day-trip my aunt, mom, and I took to see "the living dinosaurs" (they still travel the country, although I expect they're a little more life-like and less "mechanical" now) when we'd come up for vacation one summer.  I cherish that memory because shortly after (I was a kid so it could've been anywhere from a month to a couple years) she became very sick and deteriorated to spending most of her last years in a nursing home. 

I understand that cooking is "a labor of love", baking I think is even more so.  I am often disgruntled by the messages today that you shouldn't give baked goods at Christmas because, well, everyone's trying to loose weight.  To me cookies (and candies, but that's another post) are a tasty symbol of love, comfort, and happiness from the baker to the recipient.  Trust me, no one would make these cookies if they didn't love you and were hoping to give you a little bit of happiness.  I also don't recommend trying to eat a whole bunch of them at one time, tends to make you a little sick (kind of like eating that bag of candy at Halloween).  Moderation people! Moderation! (soap box done)

I modified the heck out of this recipe, which admittedly was probably my downfall.  The recipe in Grandma's Recipe Box is the original version.  I decided to modify it for a certain Christmas cookie exchange in the hopes of wow-ing friends and winning first prize for my baking expertise.  (Yes.  I'll admit my pride (they sayeth it goes before a fall).) As I cleaned my kitchen of my giant mess last night I felt like I was in a scene from a play or end of tv show, where you see someone cleaning the set with a sense of reflection.  These are a few lessons I learned:

• Keep it simple.  It doesn't matter how much expertise you may/may not have, your friends/family will always appreciate your effort - though it's preferable not to serve burned chocolate.
• When you need help, ask.
• Sprinkles make everything better.

The recipe calls for making bars, even says it in the title (yep, there's a reason for that).  And like any candy bar (think Twix especially) it's basically in layers.

In the spirit of Christmas I decided to cut out the dough bases into trees.

The "base layer" is essentially a shortbread cookie

The middle layer is caramel.  The original recipe has you melting down the caramels that you find in the store.  I didn't feel like unwrapping 1.5 lbs of Brach's caramels (though I imagine there might be others) and melting them down and then adding a bunch of stuff.  I decided to make my own caramel (that pride thing).  From reading the caramel recipe and some of the comments it seems that the caramel should get hard, but the 2 or 3 times I've used it, it's always stayed soft.  The first time I tried the CBC recipe I used the caramel recipe and added the evaporated milk, butter, and powdered sugar the CBC recipe calls for.  This makes it very soft and the powdered sugar gives it a slightly lumpy/gritty texture not to mention making it ridiculously sweet!  I am not sure if this would be the case with melted caramels or not. 

As writer/photographer/baker, I chose not to photograph my giant mistake of not using a rack and pouring the caramel onto the bases in a pan.  I imagine this would be less of a problem when making bars, since you can make one big rectangle/square to pour and spread the caramel.  I might still put them on a rack for the caramel to "drain" over the sides (make sure you put something under the rack to keep the liquid-y caramel from going all over the place).

Caramel covered cookies, after I pried them up with a knife and scraped off the sides

Finally, I have no experience with chocolate.  Not melting it, not tempering it, not making stuff (truffles, candies, etc) with it.  I followed the recipe the last time, but the chocolate was so soft and never hardened that I was afraid I'd have to give out these cookies with a wet-nap.  I was determined to figure out a way to get the chocolate to harden.  I found a website "for analytical minds" that explained tempering chocolate or at the very least melting chocolate.  I also learned that adding anything to chocolate will cause it to go soft and stay soft.  Chocolate melting in the microwave is fairly easy and fairly easily burned.  Burned chocolate looks and smells fairly awful.  Thanks to having acquired several bags of Hershey's milk chocolate bits, I chose to melt the chocolate (a few attempts were made) and then dip my cookies.

For fun and color I finally added sprinkles.

I did each layer on 3 separate days to let the cookies cool, caramel harden as much as it was going to, and the chocolate to harden (This actually happened surprisingly fast, to the point where some cookies do not have sprinkles b/c by the time I finished dipping the last cookies the chocolate had already hardened on some of the others.).

 A labor of love for sure, and a tasty one at that.