I found myself scrolling Facebook reels one night, with no end in sight. Then, I came across a reel of a baker making these toffee chocolate chunk cookies and I immediately got off my phone and got up to bake. This sounds like exactly what I have been craving lately and the cookies in the reel looked amazing so I’m crossing my fingers that these will come out even better.
To start this recipe, you have to make homemade toffee. I actually expected this to be worse/take longer than it did but it was actually pretty simple. I will admit, I messed up the first batch by using too high of heat which meant it cooked too fast and the butter separated out. But it was easy enough that I didn’t mind baking the second batch and doing it correctly this time. With just butter, brown sugar, and salt, I had toffee ready and cooling on my counter. Once it cooled, I topped it with a layer of chocolate and set it aside to solidify.
The cookie dough recipe immediately had my hackles up. It starts out with cold, cubed butter. Typically you want a softened butter or a melted butter for creaming with the sugar inside your cookie dough. Cold and cubed butter is typically reserved for pastries such as croissants because you do not want the butter to fully incorporate but instead sit inside the dough and while baking it melts into the dough and leaves a pocket of air, giving the flakiness you love in a croissant. This is not what you want in a cookie dough so I am skeptical.
Starting with cold butter and my sugars, I mixed them on a low speed in my mixer. The recipe says after two minutes it’s okay to still have unincorporated butter and I did, so I moved into the next step. I added in the vanilla and eggs and after mixing for a few minutes, the recipe says my butter should all be incorporated but alas that was not my reality. I mixed a little longer and gave up. You can only do so much to cold butter. I then added in all of the dry ingredients and it came together into a nice cookie dough. It was tasty and ready for the toffee.
Dear reader, I forgot a somewhat important step here. I never put my toffee in the fridge for the chocolate to fully harden up. At this point, I cut up my toffee and put it into the cookie dough. As soon as I turned on the mixer I realized my mistake. The chocolate all came off my toffee and incorporated into the cookie dough instead. I effectively made chocolate cookies with toffee chunks rather than cookies with chocolate toffee chunks.
For the next step, you are supposed to scoop out the balls of cookie dough and then refrigerate them. Due to my large mistake prior, I started to go a little rogue here. I didn’t have time to scoop the dough so I put the full bowl into the fridge to chill for an hour and scooped afterwards. While I don’t recommend this, it definitely worked just as well, it was just very hard to scoop. The recipe called for using a 3 tablespoon sized scoop and estimated you would get 13 cookies. I unfortunately prefer a smaller cookie and again, since I’ve already gone rogue, I went for a 1.5 tablespoon sized scoop and I got about 2 dozen cookie dough balls scooped out.
I put a dozen cookies into the oven to bake at 350°. While the recipe calls for a bake time of 12-14 minutes I adjusted for my smaller cookies and found they were done at 11 minutes. They smelled amazing and the chocolate being mixed in made them look really interesting.
I was too excited to try this cookie so I had to dive in and eat one warm. This was heavenly. The toffee was melted and gooey and a perfect compliment to the cookie. I will say that when I later ate one that was cooled down, the toffee brought a bit of a crunch to the cookie which was also very nice and provided an interesting texture. This recipe was resilient and phenomenal. I have saved this recipe in my bookmarks and highly recommend you do too. I will be reaching for this cookie recipe again and again.
Leave a Reply