Homemade Twix-like candy bar
Brian On Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 08:09AM This is one I've been waiting for, devoted readers. Normally I like to do the simple dishes, the items you can incorporate into many other dishes for maximum utility and deliciousness. Utility ingredients, we call them. But it's hard to do a blog about making things from scratch without doing something a little above-and-beyond every now and then, and this time, it's candy.
Specifically, we're talking a cookie base, topped with caramel, topped with chocolate. Similar to the Twix bar, but in a totally non-trademark-infringing way. And, I should add, much better.
The great thing about this recipe is that we've already seen most of it. We've made the cookie base, when we made shortbread cookies. We've made the caramel topping when we made sea salted caramel. All we have to do is a couple of tweaks to each of those then top it all with some chocolate. What could be easier?
Start with the cookies. Make those just like normal up to the shaping stage. Shape them in a rectangular form that you can slice into your cookie base. When you slice them, make them a bit thicker than normal, like so:
Bake them at 350°F for 16-18 minutes, or until they start to brown. Lay them out on a cooling rack on top of a protective layer like a silpat or parchment paper on top of a cookie sheet. This will helpful later.
Next make the caramel. Just as before, except only cook it to the soft ball stage, which is 234-240°F. If you set a bowl of water beside the candy, you can drizzle some caramel into it when your testing. That will cool it quickly and give you a chance to check the consistency, which is the traditional method instead of using a thermometer.
Once the caramel is made, top the cookies with it.
Nearly there. Now temper some chocolate. Well, I say temper. Tempering chocolate makes it very pretty and resistant to the sorts of wear and tear candy will have to go through before it is eaten. If you are making a completely chocolate-covered candy, this is a vital step. In my case, I just melted most of the chocolate over a double boiler and took it off the heat to let residual heat to the rest of the work. The grip point on these tasty treats is the cookie, not the chocolate, so you have some leeway. If you're keen to temper properly, and it's a great skill to have, there are many guides to doing so. I recommend this excellent chocolate tempering guide from the always thorough Cooking for Engineers.
Let the chocolate cool a bit (for the tempering, to between 88° and 90°F for dark chocolate, or 86° to 88° for milk chocolate, but as long as it's still spreadable it should be fine), and top the cookies with the chocolate.
Once you are done, let cool, share, and enjoy.
Oh, I know. Who can wait, right? When you eat your first one warm, just be prepared for it to taste mostly of chocolate. Warm chocolate has a much stronger flavor than warm caramel, and your caramel will have had more of a chance to cool than the chocolate. When everything has cooled, the flavors will be balanced, and you'll have a much better taste experience.
You should also note that if your caramel drips over the side, as ours did, you will likely need to cut out the cookies from the cooling rack once everything has cooled. We used kitchen shears for this, and it wasn't too hard, but the cookies are delicate so you can't manhandle them too roughly during the process. With more care and more chocolate, you can cover the cookies entirely, this making them easier to handle, but I really like the presentation this way.
To store these (for example, to share), the caramel will be very sticky, so wrap in parchment paper or waxed paper before putting in your airtight container. But if you do share them, you will, of course, be universally beloved, as they are wonderful.
Reader Comments (4)
Wow. These look incredible.
Thanks!
Yum! Try the same thing with peanut butter and chocolate--best peanut butter cup you'll ever eat.
These look tasty! Oh, and because it must be said:
"Brian, what pretty hands you have"