on Tuesday 22 December 2009
Just like chocolate, English toffee was another delicacy that my mom rationed in small quantities to me when I was little. She had her reasons, and now I have my reasons for why I pick up a box of Almond Roca once in a while.
It’s never Christmas without my candy thermometer, and this year I decided to put the little thing to the ultimate test – candy making. After a quick search, I realized that toffee is actually pretty easy to make, so after a Christmas party where I had already drank a few glasses of wine, I began heating up butter and sugar in my kitchen at 10:30pm on a Sunday night. Surely enough, even with alcohol in me, this recipe was hard to mess up – now it’ll be a staple for Christmas time next year!
English Toffee with Chocolate & Hazelnuts
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 tsp sea salt
- 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup of chocolate chips if you’re going for easy, or 1/2 cup chocolate to be tempered
- 1/2 cup hazelnuts, toasted, slightly peeled where you can, and chopped roughly
- In a heavy-bottomed pot, melt butter, sugar, salt, and vanilla at medium heat. Stir constantly, using a heat-proof spatula if you have one. Keep the candy thermometer clipped to one side of the pot.
- Once mixture reaches threading temperature, just over 100 degrees Celsius, reduce the cooking temperature so that it is not a hard rolling boil, but still boiling nonetheless. At this point, you don’t have to stir as much – just temper the mixture once in a while.
- While this is cooking, line a 9×9 square dish with parchment paper, making sure to cover all sides.
- When the thermometer registers at about 140 degrees Celsius – pay close attention! This is all going to happen very fast – it’ll reach the 300 degree Fahrenheit or about 150 Celsius hard crack stage very quickly, and as soon as it does, remove, stir mixture and pour into the square dish lined with parchment paper.
- If you’re going for an easy toffee recipe, wait about 2 minutes for the mixture to start setting, and throw the chocolate chips on top. The heat will melt the chips, so smooth out the chocolate evenly, and then sprinkle the hazelnuts.
- If you’re going for tempered chocolate goodness, let the pan cool and stick in the fridge if you can, while you temper the chocolate. Just before throwing the chocolate onto the toffee, dab it first with some paper towel to get rid of excess oil. This will help the chocolate stick better. Sprinkle on hazelnuts.
- Let chill in the fridge overnight or at least a few hours, then break apart and enjoy!
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on Sunday 20 December 2009
When Starbucks first came out with these, Alex would always pick one up whenever we stopped in. Slowly, from having lukewarm feelings towards them, I became a fan of the spicy and sweet flavour. I’ve always wanted to find a recipe that mimics just this cookie, and so entered Barefoot Contessa at Home.
Since Barefoot Contessa has baking mixes as well, I actually first tried this cookie via her box mix, and loved it so much that I searched for it in my Barefoot Contessa cookbooks. Surely enough, there was the recipe in Barefoot Contessa at Home, and I made it immediately.
The recipe sucks.
After having seen how runny/sticky the batter from the mix turned out, I was dismayed to find actual decent-solid-like cookie dough in my mixing bowl. From there, it was a downhill experiment where I forgot to add baking soda to the second batch, and the third batch’s consistency was even further from my expectations that I couldn’t even muster up the energy to roll the cookies in sugar before baking.
That was all last year. This year, I decided that the problem must lie within the proportion of the ingredients in the recipe – and I boiled it down to the fact that everything was in cup measures. Out of curiosity, I weighed my cup of flour and discovered that today, a cup weighed 6 oz. in my apartment! (On a dry summer’s day, it’s about 4.5 oz. using the exact same cup.) So after some fine-tuning (hello, first-batch ginger rocks in garbage can), here’s the recipe:
Ginger Molasses Cookies – adapted from Barefoot Contessa at Home by Ina Garten
Ingredients
- 8 oz. dark brown sugar
- 2.5 oz. canola oil
- 3.5 oz. molasses
- 1 large egg
- 2 tsp. ground cinnamon
- 1 tsp. ground cloves
- 1 tsp. ground nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp. ground ginger
- 1/4 tsp. sea salt
- 10 oz. all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- roughly 1/2 cup chopped crystallized ginger
- granulated sugar, for rolling cookies in
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
- In a stand mixer, mix together on medium speed, the sugar, oil, molasses, spices, and salt for about 5 minutes. You shouldn’t have to scrape the bowl too much, but do as necessary.
- Add in egg and mix on medium speed for another 2 minutes.
- Add in flour and baking soda, and mix on medium speed to incorporate all the flour. Add the chopped ginger and mix until combined.
- Roll the dough into about 1″ balls, and drop into sugar. Flatten on the cookie sheet.
- Put into preheated oven for 10 minutes. Depending on oven temperature etc., it should be ready at about the 13 minute mark. In my convection oven I left them for only 10.5 minutes and they turned out perfectly.
- Cool on the cookie sheet for 3 minutes before removing to rack to cool completely. Makes 32 regular-sized cookies, or 16 jumbo Starbucks-sized ones.
Notes:
- The dough dries out and “seals” itself easily, so my second batch, which was rolled and then sat on the counter for 10 minutes waiting for the first batch to bake, didn’t crack as much. Pictures here are of the first batch.
- When you remove the cookies from the oven, they should still be puffed up. That’s fine, during the three-minute cooling period, they’ll flatten and start to look like what you want them to look like.
Now go and make them! They taste just like the wonderful things from Starbucks!
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on Saturday 19 December 2009
Time has flown by since October, and I can’t really tell you what I did this November, because it all went by like a blur. As of Friday, things have finally slowed down enough that I think I might get my personal life back, with no guarantee on how long it’ll be around for. Oh well, I suppose beggars can’t be choosers.
I’ve also been very behind on my holiday shopping. I’ve been picking up little things via Etsy since late November, but I really haven’t picked up anything that needs to reside under trees, to be opened on December 25. If I’m honest, most of the things purchased from Etsy ended up being for me, anyway. I have awesome arm-warmers to go with my 3/4 length sleeve coat, a beautiful cake pedestal, and a neck-warmer-esque scarf that I will probably end up giving away just because I don’t have enough presents. I attempted to shop yesterday for some presents, and I managed to get something little for Alex, while discovering a new work wardrobe for myself. I tried again today, and walked away empty-handed for others, but with a beautiful new winter coat for myself. I’m pretty sure I’ve blown my presents budget – on stuff for myself. Ughhhh.
Anyway, rant aside, I’m back, and I’m determined to catch up on all the festive joys I’ve missed (read: baking), so I’ll be making something new everyday until I go back to Vancouver on Christmas Eve – stay tuned for recipes!
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