Alpha Bakers - Luxury Chocolate Buttercrunch Toffee

The name says it all. What we have here is some pretty good toffee covered (on both sides!) with chocolate and dipped (on both sides!) in nuts. Madness. Delicious.

The only change I made to the recipe was running out of corn syrup, so I substituted about 2/3 molasses, which worked out because I didn't have the specified brown sugar anyway, so a little molasses was needed. It had no effect on the texture and little on the taste. This was universally loved, although I found it a little sweet and would use a darker chocolate next time. According to my co-worker, the teen shelvers just stood around saying 'mmmmmm,' and one told me that 'chocolate is [her] best friend and [her] boyfriend.' My boyfriend, who as you know generally avoids sweets, but has a weakness for salty toffee and Heath bars, got the two pieces above, and was happy, saying that it 'sticks in your teeth like something very not good for you, in a good way.' I ran out of almonds so covered the bars in half almonds, half walnuts.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Crack Blondies

Dorie called these something like Chewy, Chunky Blondies, but that is a serious understatement. These candy bar-like lumps of all-American overkill are unquestionably crack blondies. And to think that until last night blondies were synonymous with lame in my mind. As my sister put it:

           "booooooooooooooooooo,
            blondies.
            yaaaaayyyyyyyy,
            blondie.
            (the band)."

I was in full agreement with this poetic little statement until around 10pm last night. Blondies always just seemed like a poor excuse for brownies, with all the butterfat and none of the joy. A comment on the TWD site the other day helped me begin my mental shift, by pointing out that blondies are just cookies in bar form. Conceiving of my creation as just a differently shaped chocolate chip cookied sorted me right out. Dorie describes these particular blondies as having more fillings than dough. I didn't have most of her suggested fillings (butterscotch chips, coconut) on hand, so I made a quick batch of toffee, and threw that in with chocolate chunks from one of those great big Trader Joes bars and some slivered almonds and Spanish peanuts. (Spanish peanuts, incidentally, are one of my more recent grocery finds. How I lived without them always on hand is hazy now.)

The toffee melted away, leaving the finished bars sticky, chewy, oozy at room temperature, and irresistable frozen. To top off the overkill, we ate them with noyaux ice cream that I made by infusing the cream with crushed cherry and apricot pits. The ice cream was subtle, but we could really taste the noyaux, in an almost citrusy aftertweak that went right up the nose. Lily, my boss at the bakery, thought it tasted something like marzipan.

The Reluctant Foodie: Sticky Toffee Pudding

Photo courtesy of Sarah Bishop-Stone. Note Moosewood Cookbook display stand.

Most of my friends are at least semi-foodies--they work in the restaurant industry, they love to cook and talk about restaurants, or they just live in New York, which pretty much qualifies regardless of other factors. The yearly gift exchanges put on by my theater company tend to resemble bridal showers, with all manner of woks and wine glasses and serving bowls and cake stands being passed back and forth. We did have one half-holdout, though, a girl who demanded that her pyrex casserole dishes be accompanied by some big earrings, at least.

While I'm sure she maintains a similar gift-related stance, I think we've finally won Miriam entirely over to the dark side.* Not only did she just admit to watching an NYTimes video about beets, she has baked at least four times in the last month. "People were just so excited to get the cookies," she said, at which I nodded sagely and pointed out that this was a largeish part of my motivation. I'm happy to say that she's taken inspiration from this blog, and two out of four have been World Peace Cookies and Salted Oatmeal Cookies.

For her birthday, Miriam attempted her most ambitious project to date, Sticky Toffee Pudding, and requested to detail her triumph in a guest post. Here she is:

"I spent Passover of 2006 in London, visiting my then-boyfriend's family, which favored lengthy and delicious meals, and kept a fairly loose version of kosher-for-Passover. One day, at a riverside inn an hour outside the city, whose location had something to do with "The Wind in the Willows," I ordered a sticky toffee pudding for dessert, thinking that "pudding" was a safe bet for something flourless. It wasn't until I was halfway through with one of the most extreme desserts I've ever had that I even realized that what I was eating had clearly been leavened and baked, and by that point I was too engrossed to care.

When we got home, Katya was convinced to make a sticky toffee pudding for us, and since then I've had it in the back of my mind as something complicated but not completely impossible to make at home--so my 29th birthday seemed like the right occasion to try. The dates and molasses required advance planning (cf. the delis in New Haven don't sell any food), and I had to sub in half-and-half for one of the cups of cream (there seemed to be one 8-oz carton of heavy cream in all Connecticut), but it was delightful and impressive for my birthday guests. This recipe is something I would never have attempted a year ago.

I hereby give you my adaptation of David Lebovitz's recipe for sticky toffee pudding, with the following notes: 1) half-and-half worked just fine in the toffee sauce, 2) I used regular dark brown sugar and no ginger, 3) I would make extra sauce next time, since I ran out of it before I ran out of pudding, and 4) I was initially worried because the sauce didn't seem to be thickening in the pan, the way he describes, but once I took it off the heat it thickened right up. Definitely serve warm and with vanilla ice cream." - Miriam

Sticky Toffee Pudding
Adapted from David Lebovitz
Adapted in turn from Sweet! (Da Capo) by Mani Niall

For the toffee sauce:
2 cups (500ml) heavy cream
1/2 cup (120g) demerara or muscovado sugar (or another dark brown sugar)
2 1/2 tablespoons golden syrup or molasses
pinch of salt

For the pudding:
6 ounces (180g) pitted dates, snipped or chopped
1 cup (250ml) water
1 teaspoon baking soda
optional: 1/3 cup (40g) candied ginger, chopped
1 1/4 cups (175g) flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
4 tablespoons (55g) unsalted butter
3/4 cup (150g) granulated sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 350F (190C) and butter an 8 1/2-inch baking dish.

2. Make the toffee sauce-bring the cream, demerara or turbinado sugar, golden syrup (or molasses) and salt to a boil in a medium saucepan, stirring often.

3. Lower heat and simmer, stirring constantly for about 5 minutes, until the mixture is thick and coats the spoon. Pour half the sauce into the prepared baking dish and place the mold in the freezer, and reserve the other half for serving.

4. To make the pudding, in a medium saucepan, heat the dates and water. Once the water begins to boil, remove from heat and stir in the baking soda. Add the ginger, if using, then set aside, but keep it slightly warm.

5. In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

6. In the bowl of a standing electric mixer, or by hand, heat the butter and granulated sugar until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs, then the vanilla. (Don't be alarmed if the mixture looks a bit curdled.)

7. Stir in half of the flour mixture, then the date mixture, then add the remaining flour mixture until just mixed. Don't overbeat the batter.

8. Scrape the batter into the prepared baking dish and bake for 50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with moist crumbs attached.

9. Remove the pudding from the oven, and let cool slightly before serving.

Serving: Spoon portions of the cake into serving bowls and douse with additional warm toffee sauce. Whipped cream or vanilla ice cream are good accompaniments, although I enjoy it just as it is.

Note: To make the pudding in advance, bake the cake without the toffee in the bottom. Let cool, then cover until close to serving time. Poke the cake about fifteen times with a chopstick. Distribute half of the sauce over the top, as shown in the photo, cover with foil, then re-warm in a 300F (150C) oven, for 30 minutes.

*To be clear, Miriam has always cooked, and loved food, she just lacked grocery stores and all cooking implements for a little while there, and so the obsession couldn't take hold with the same rigor.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Caramel Crunch Bars

Overheard in the stairwell, as our upstairs neighbors went out on Saturday night:

Him: They're baking again!
Her: It smells sweet.
Him: mmm
Her: I love it when it's bread...

I loved them so much that when they came home they found a tin of these ridiculously sweet little bars at their front door.
This week's Tuesdays with Dorie challenge was caramel crunch bars--a buttery shortbread-like base with chopped chocolate in it, topped with melted chocolate and toffee bits. This is the somewhat upscale variation on two specialties that friends of mine have perfected, the saltine toffee crunch and Miriam's bake sale tested toffee bars. People don't seem to be able to resist toffee, and, as Andy on The Office said, 'I am a person.' I love anything with burnt sugar and butter, caramels of all kinds.

The only changes that I made in this recipe were to reduce the total amount of chocolate (out of necessity) and to use plain old coffee grounds instead of instant espresso powder. In a pudding or a more delicate cake, that might have been a problem, but here they just blended in and added their crunch. I made the toffee myself, over almonds, using the recipe from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop (much like this one).

The end product? Fun, but kind of overwhelming. For my taste, I should have just made a double batch of toffee. Still, they had that sweet intensity that sometimes everyone just needs, an ice cream sundae in bar form, buttery and tooth-aching and addictive. I bet they'd be fantastic picnic food, after something very savory.

And yes, I did put vanilla ice cream on them--or toffee vanilla ice cream, because I made it in the same pot that the toffee had been made in, and it melted and absorbed the drips. I churned the vanilla ice cream that didn't go into the sandwiches with the remaining crumbs from last week's chocolate cakes. I am a TWD recycling superstar.And the neighbors--liked them very much, though they may also have found them overwhelming. He just came down to return the tin, used a lot of words like 'intense,' and brought me a sample of his new sourdough starter. I gave him half of mine in return, to see if they were different at all. Supposedly, after a few weeks in a new place, a starter takes on the character and local yeasts of its current location, no matter where it came from, so maybe they'll be just the same, but it will be interesting to try.