Pete sings: "Deeka bez! Deeka bez! Deeka aaahhh way!" Can you translate?
I am up baking for tomorrow's cookie exchange. My mission, when I chose to accept it, was to bake 9 dozen cookies for tomorrow. Nine dozen! That's a whole lotta cookies. Two women have since dropped out, leaving me only 7 dozen to bake, but that exceeds my cookie output for, oh, probably all of 2007. (Elwood P. bakes lots more cookies than I do. Isn't that domestic of him?)
Ergo: bar cookies. (I hate the scooping up and splodging on the baking sheet routine.) These are called toffee tops. Preheat oven to 350 and prepare an 8x8 pan. (Prepare = line with foil long enough to hang over the edges so you can lift the cookies out of there. You'll be gouging out your eyes if you try to scoop them out of the pan.) Combine one and a quarter cups flour, a quarter teaspoon of salt, 2 T. brown sugar (packed), a stick of cold butter (cubed), a quarter-cup of slivered almonds, and a quarter teaspoon of almond extract, and blitz in the food processor. After everything is combined I add a tablespoon of cold water to cut down on the crumbly factor, but this is not in the recipe. Press into your pan, making a little bit of a rim at the edges so you do not glue the bars to your pan in the next step. Bake for 12 minutes. You want the crust to be slightly firm.
Combine 1/2 c. brown sugar (packed), 1/3 c. butter, and a tablespoon of water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and then let it boil for a minute, stirring intermittently. If you can, time it so that your toffee layer is done boiling just as your timer beeps for the crust. Pour the toffee over the crust and pop it back into the oven for 10 more minutes.
When the ten minutes are up (you want the toffee bubbling vigorously in the oven), pull out the pan. Let it set up for a minute, just so you have a bit of a crust. Sprinkle over 3/4 c. of chocolate chips. Cover the pan for a few minutes so the chips soften up, and spread with a knife to make a smooth coating. Sprinkle slivered almonds over the chocolate, pressing them in gently so they stick to the cookies when the chocolate firms up. Cut them fairly small -- they're pretty rich.
In addition to the 8x8 batch, I doubled the recipe and put it in a 9x13, and made a recipe-and-a-quarter in a 9x9 pan. I am hoping that my 9x13 batch will be all right in the morning, because its toffee layer is a little wobbly tonight. I had an expat Southerner moment while smoothing chocolate over toffee lava, when I said to myself, "Oh, no, it's not settin' up right." Midwesterners do not talk about things "settin' up right." What do they say, though? I've lived in the Midwest for...hm, I think it's 17 of the last 20 years, and I'm not quite sure what a Midwesterner says when she gets molten toffee lava instead of partly solidified toffee aa or toffee pahoehoe (that one's for you, Arwen).
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