Toffee Fingers

After creating my toffee tarts I typed up my blog post to discuss the dessert I had made. However, I completely forgot to put up my post due to my hectic packing for my Boston flight on Friday morning. So here it is at last, the post about my first dessert, ‘Toffee Fingers.’

For my first recipe it was decided that I would bake Toffee Fingers, for not only do I love toffee with a passion, its skill level was only 2. In this book all the recipes are ranked from 1 to 3, easy to hard. The recipe for such was:

Toffee Fingers

Ingredients:

1 ½ cups of all-purpose flour

¾ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

½ cup butter, softened

½ cup powered sugar

2 tablespoons packed brown sugar

½ cup toffee pieces

½ cup semisweet chocolate pieces

1 teaspoon shortening

¼ cup toffee pieces

1. Preheat oven to 325 F. Use a 8x8x2 baking pan (it says you can put foil on the inside to help take out the bars easier but it is not necessary)

2. In a small bowl stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt. In a large mixing bowl beat butter with an electric mixer of medium to high speed for 30 seconds. (Now you don’t really need to use an electric beater, a mixer works just as well) Beat in flour mixture. Stir in ¼ cup toffee pieces. Put the dough within the pan, flatten evenly, and poke a fork through it every ½ inch.

3. Bake in preheated oven for about 20 minutes or until golden brown. Let it cool when finished.

4. Cut each strip into sections, however large or small you prefer your toffee fingers to be.

5. In a small heavy saucepan heat and stir the chocolate pieces and shortening until smooth. Cool slightly and then drizzle over the bars. Right after the drizzle, sprinkle the bars with ¼ cup of toffee pieces. Let bars stand until chocolate is set.

The finished dessert!

The instructions have been slightly modified in order to make it easier for any of you who may be interested in cooking these delights. Here are some extra hints to help you in your cooking.

I found all the ingredients relatively quickly except for the shortening, which is located with the vegetable oil. Make sure it says shortening and don’t buy something else if you can’t find it (I almost gave up…). The toffee pieces should be found right next to the chocolate pieces in the sweets section. Also, you may notice in the ingredients that there are two different amounts of toffee. At first I found that confusing too, but they are needed for separate parts of the baking process.

The chocolate takes quite a while to chill which will enable you to stack the treats on top of each other in a box. My recommendation is to put the treats in the fridge for about twenty minutes so the chocolate completely hardens. And don’t be hesitant putting the chocolate on the treats. The semi bitter taste of chocolate helps counteract the very strong sweetness the toffee adds to the flavor.

Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. You will have to flatten it within the pan to make sure all of the bars are even; otherwise some might not bake all the way through. Overall, this was a very easy recipe and I look forward to cooking my next dessert for my class this week. :)