The Country Dish

One Smart Cookie…

Just one bite of these sinfully decadent Easy Toffee Bars full of rich chocolate with a melt-in-the-mouth texture, and you’ll be swearing that all those store-bought cookies “taste like sadness”!

You’re only 6 ingredients away from deliciousness!

There are few things easier to bake, and equally beloved by young and old alike, as the humble cookie. Yet, even so, in these hectic times, it can sometimes be an inhibitingly lengthy process to form those seemingly infinite little cookie dough mounds and tediously bake them off one pan at a time. Most of us are busy, or lazy, or both.

Behold, the allure of the bar cookie! Invented, I like to imagine, by a hungry teenage boy who, having gone to the trouble of mixing the cookie dough, cannot resist the urge to simply form it into one giant cookie – presumably the sooner to eat, and the less to share.

This ease of baking it all at once and being done with it holds true for busy moms as well, and these Easy Toffee Bars have the added plus of calling for very few ingredients, all of which you probably already have on hand in your pantry, as well as boasting a richly decadent shortbread flavor and texture due to not including any eggs.*

*Note — I just threw that sentence in there to bypass all you people who were about to ask me if I accidentally left out the eggs. Also, before you ask, yes, it is actually important that you use real butter for this recipe. Otherwise, it just won’t have that same crispy, toffee-like crunchiness and, errrrr, buttery-ness.

A tasty walk down Memory Lane…

This recipe for Easy Toffee Bars was actually one of the first cookies that I taught myself to make at the tender age of 8 or 9, after my mother gave in and turned me loose in the kitchen without her help after an ill-fated cherry-pie-making teaching session. And I made it often, party because it’s delicious, and partly because clean-up is a breeze, thanks to a non-sticky dough that releases from the bowl and paddle like magic.

In those long-ago days before the internet, most of my recipes were found in my mother’s big, fat, red-checkered “Better Homes & Gardens” cookbook, and this one was no exception. My mother’s copy of this 1953 classic is still her favorite cookbook, filled with handwritten notes and dog-eared pages, and I was thrilled to acquire my own pristine copy of this edition on ebay a while back.

Actually, I originally bought it thinking that my mom might prefer a copy that was not disintegrating before our very eyes due to much love and heavy usage, but I quickly realized that her copy had deep sentimental value having been purchased for her by her own mother. Apparently, when my mom was eleven years old, my grandma (who never had much in the way of money) bought it for her at the local “Green Stamp” store (though once common, these will probably only be remembered by those readers who were children of the 60’s or before). At any rate, I, therefore, came out of it with my very own copy – not a bad outcome at all.

Even at a young age, I was nearly incapable of following a recipe without “tweaking” it, blatantly cannibalizing recipes right and left into my own creations. But, while most of the recipes in this book are showing their age in one way or another, this one may just be the only one that I still make exactly as written because it is, quite simply, perfect.

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