February: Toffee Slice
February: Toffee Slice
A simple and delicious treat
When Molly and I began thinking about February, the chocolate food group came immediately to our minds! After all, February is the month for St. Valentine’s Day when it’s so much delicious fun to share chocolatey tokens of love with the people we care about. Besides, we have several family birthdays to celebrate each February.
So, our theme for this issue of the Recipe Box is chocolate!
Toffee Slice
I have been making these cookies for decades. I can make them in my sleep…almost! Basic, simple, easy, and delicious, these treats make everyone happy, and they rely on ingredients most of us always have on hand. These are the cookies that our children brought to classroom parties, from preschool well into high school. They made their appearance at PTA bake sales and sleep overs and scout meetings, and at the end of regular dinners when someone at the table needed a reason to smile.
To make it easy to cut even slices, begin by lining your baking sheet with baking parchment that hangs over the edge of the pan. Once the cookies cool, just lift off the parchment and use a pizza cutter to make short work of cutting and shaping the cookies into chocolate-covered squares or bars or diamonds.
Top the cookies with nuts of your choice – We like sliced almonds, as well as walnuts or pecans, and if you choose to top the chocolate layer with hazelnuts, I don’t see why you can’t call them Mediterranean Slice!
Toffee Slice
Yield: The number of cookies you get will depend on how you decide to slice them.
Ingredients
1 cup (2 4-ounce sticks) room-temperature sweet butter
1 cup brown sugar*
1 egg yolk
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
A pinch of salt (a half teaspoon or to taste)
1 cup high-quality semisweet or bittersweet chocolate/ chocolate chips
1-1/2 to 2 cups sliced or chopped nuts
Preparation
Here’s how to make the cookies.
Line a 13x9-inch baking sheet with parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees, F.
While you make the cookie dough, toast the nuts. Place sliced or chopped nuts of choice in a pie dish or cake pan, and toast in the 300-degree oven, shaking the pan once, halfway through, for 8 minutes, or until they smell toasty-delicious! Set the nuts aside, and raise the oven temperature to 350 degrees, F.
Using an electric mixer, cream together the butter and brown sugar.
Beat in the egg yolk, and then stir in the vanilla extract.
In a separate bowl, combine the flour with the pinch of salt, and on low speed, blend the flour mixture into the butter-sugar mixture.
Now, plop the dough down on top of the parchment and, using your palms, pat out to an even thickness, filling the pan.
Place the pan in the oven and bake for 15-20 minutes. The baked dough should still feel soft enough to cut through easily and be just lightly browned.
While the toffee layer bakes, melt the chocolate chips. Use a microwave on its medium-low setting to do this in two-minute bursts, or use a double boiler, or a stove-top setting meant for melting chocolate, or whichever method works for you.
As soon as you remove the pan from the oven, use an offset spatula to spread the melted chocolate on top of the cookie layer. Sprinkle nuts liberally on top of the melted chocolate, and set the pan aside on a rack to cool completely. Feel free to add some flakey sea salt along with the nuts if you’d like some extra salty/sweet contrast.
You may choose to refrigerate the cookies before serving, but be aware that it’s much easier to cut the bars before refrigerating.
*One more suggestion we can share is that, if you want your cookies to fall lower on the glycemic index, you can substitute coconut sugar for the brown sugar. The cookies will be delicious – but different – and not quite as sweet. And, if you’re serving these to someone who needs to eat less sugar, for whatever reason, you’ll be doing that person a kindness while still pleasing everyone lucky enough to enjoy a slice of toffee pleasure..