Whip out your aprons and mixing bowls, ladies and germs, it's time for a bake along highlighting one of my favorite ingredients of all time.
I'm talking about toffee, my dears. Toffee. Sweet, sugary, buttery, crunchy TOFFEE. I drool just thinking about it.
Maybe I'm just a good little English girl, but I love toffee. Truly, truly love it. They'll have to pull it from my cold, dead hands when the time comes.
And now I am sharing my love with you in the form of Chocolate Chip Toffee Cookies. Made from one of the best chocolate chip cookie recipes I have ever used, these cookies are soft and pillowy and basically everything a chocolate chip cookie should be. A note about using toffee: toffee is a lot like caramel. Get that stuff all melted down and it is gooey and sticky. This impacts the texture of the final cookie. Bear that in mind.
Here's what you need:
1 C. butter, slightly softened
1 C. granulated white sugar
1 C. brown sugar, packed
2 eggs at room temperature (or as close as you can)
2 t. pure vanilla extract
1 t. baking soda or corn starch
2 t. hot water
1/2 t. salt
3 C. APF (all purpose flour)
2 C. chocolate chips (I ALWAYS use semi-sweet, but that's a personal choice)
1 C. toffee (or nuts, other baking chip flavors or nothing if you really want)
It's a pretty lengthy list, but it's worth it. Trust me on this.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. If you know your oven temperature is off, adjust accordingly, adding or subtracting degrees as necessary.
Cream your butter and sugar together. I prefer using a stand mixer to whip up these cookies because it blends the ingredients better, but it can be done by hand as well.
Never forget that your cookies are only as good as your ingredients. If you're on a budget (like myself) and can only really splurge on one quality ingredient, make it your butter. Imagine your cookies are a house. A house needs a strong foundation. Your cookie-house's foundation is the butter. If that foundation isn't good enough, your cookie-house will blow over. This metaphor has now gone too far. See that? This is good butter.
My next piece of cookie recipe wisdom? Never ever EVER trust a chocolate chip cookie recipe that doesn't include brown sugar. That's totally unnatural. Everything is better with brown sugar. (Cue the Rolling Stones.)
It's so beautiful!
Add in your eggs one at a time and mix low until they're fully incorporated with the creamed butter/sugar mixture. It'll look like a slightly wetter version of what you already had. At this point, add in both teaspoons of vanilla and mix low again.
Between each mix in, scrape down your beaters (or spoon, if you're doing it by hand) to make sure you don't lose any of your wet ingredients. It'll make your life easier down the line. Next, dissolve your baking soda or corn starch in the two teaspoons of hot water and mix it in with the rest of your wet ingredients. You'd be surprised the difference this easy little step makes, making your cookies infinitely softer. I'm not going to mention which one I used (I have to keep SOME trade secrets to myself, after all) but both ingredients work admirably. Add your salt here too.
Now it's time to add your APF. The flour you use in a baked good can drastically change the texture of your final product. Cake flours are made from softer wheat, making the cake much more tender. APF, a blend of soft and hard wheat, is the workhorse of flours, good for most baking. Whole wheat flour has a subtly grittier texture. I never use it alone for that reason.
When measuring flour, spoon it in to your measuring cup and level with a metal-bladed spatula. Scooping flour right out of the bag could lead to you over-filling or under-filling your measuring cups, and that means not the right amount!
<---This is your fully mixed dough. Scrape that bowl and the beaters down so you don't lose any! Also, be sure to stir it by hand a few times, as flour and other dry ingredients can get stuck at the bottom of the bowl.
This next part is going to take some elbow grease. This dough is heavy, and you have to fold in the chocolate chips and other mix-ins by hand. I added the chocolate chips first, mixed, then added the toffee. Dig down deep in that bowl to keep things evenly distributed. And voila, cookie dough. While Baking Beta believes in proper food safety and the consumption of raw eggs is a big old no-no, it's hard not to take a spoon to this baby.
Bake for ten minutes. I had a lovely lunch of shredded wheat while I waited. Gotta do something that feels healthy while I'm making cookies, right?
My oven runs a little cold, so I ended up tacking on an extra minute of bake time. After you pull them out of the oven, let them sit on the hot tray for a minute or two so they don't break when you move them from the pan onto the cooling rack. Don't let them sit for much longer than that, however, because they do keep baking from the heat of the tray. You can tell by listening to the little hissing sound that is the result of cooking fat. Overcooked cookies are hard cookies. And we don't want those here! Not until gingerbread man time, anyway...
I got about four dozen cookies from this recipe. Depending on the size of your scoops, you may get more or less. I guarantee you---they won't last long.
There you have it, folks! Baking Beta's Chocolate Chip Toffee Cookie bake along!
Enjoy :)
Taffeta, darlings! (Bonus points to those who get that reference)
BB
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