A Very Big "HIT"....oh yum!

Saltines, butter, brown sugar, chocolate...I've seen this recipe before many times in the past. It's a mock English Toffee type of thing. It always sounded good but I've resisted making it for some reason...perhaps it's the saltines that made me question whether or not it was worth the time.




The other day in a Facebook "comment" conversation I was having with my friend Michele and her friend Sandy, Michele was making these fantastic sounding neopolitan type cookies and had some concerns about how to go about cutting the dough. Sandy suggested that Michele take a look at an entry on the blog "Smitten Kitchen". I took a look at the blog and fell in love with it.


I clicked on the "candy" category and the first recipe I looked at was a recipe called "chocolate caramel crack(ers)". Check it out, I dare you. Okay....are you back now? How does it look? Great, right? Yeah, I thought so too.


You guessed it....I made it. I loved, loved, loved that it was made with Matzo Crackers and I actually had a box of them here on hand so I thought to myself, "what the heck". I had bought the Matzo for another recipe and only used a few sheets of it so what better way to use more of these?


This is the final product, all ready to be sealed up in an airtight container so not one little, precious bit of it becomes stale!

I pretty much followed the recipe to a T. The pan size it calls for does not correspond with what I ended up using and what the pictures in the blog appear to be using. I used a typical jelly roll/cookie sheet type of pan and with how many Matzo sheets (should "Matzo" be capitalized...hmmm...I don't know so I will keep doing it) it appeared the pan held in the blog pictures, it appears she used the same size pan as me. I was a bit worried there would not be enough toffee to go over it but it was all good...plenty of it.  I strongly recommend that you skip all oiling and buttering of pans and use her suggestion of lining the sheet with foil and then lining it with parchment paper.  Once these were ready to be pulled out of the pan and cut up they were 100% trouble free.


I used salted Matzo and salted butter so I skipped the sea salt step...good thing I did. The salt from the Matzo was just enough to give it that subtle saltiness that goes well with this kind of stuff. The toffee mixture boiled up nicely and smelled soooooo very good in the house. I had no problems at all with the baking part of it...however, I did forget to set the timer so I probably did not have it in there as long as 15 minutes fearing that I would overcook it. My end result does indicate that it could have probably cooked just a few more minutes....there's just a bit of chewiness where the toffee is thicker...it's still good, mind you...it's just not the completely crunchy, melt in your mouth toffee like you get where it's a little thinner. I used toasted pecans for the top because it's what I had. I was able to toast them in a frying pan while I was waiting for the toffee mixture to boil so it was no problem at all to take that extra step...I think it's always worth it to give your nuts a toasting....the flavor is so much more for that few minutes work.


I am happy I made this but on the other hand, it's just one more of those very easy to do type of recipes that you can whip up in a small amount of time and that you can seriously overindulge with in about the same time it takes to pull it together. It's dangerous stuff, I tell ya, but definitely one of those things to make if you need to bring a dessert/baked good somewhere...you can have your few pieces and get it OUT of the house!!