Bread and Wine: Dark Chocolate Sea Salted Toffee

Of all the recipes I've made so far from Bread and Wine, I think this is my favorite.

My family loves toffee. I have memories of my mom buying Heath Bars from the grocery when I was a little girl. I married a man who adores double chocolate toffee shakes from ice cream shops. We can't wait for Christmas when our friend Ashley makes a ginormous pan of the stuff, cracking it and piling it into tins for us to eat at our annual Christmas party.

Toffee, you see, lies close to our heart.

I got to make this recipe with my daughter during one of my son's epic three hour naps, on a day when the car battery died, it was freezing outside, and I couldn't pick up groceries. It was a nutty day, but to me that made it that much more important to actually make toffee. Because for me cooking, and cooking through this book, hasn't been about making pretty food when the day is perfect, but rather cooking on the hard days, as well as the good, and finding joy and comfort around the table anyway.

Hallelujah anyway, as Saint Anne Lamott says. Toffee anyway, I say.

 Come on, sit down, and let's eat!

The Recipe: Dark Chocolate Sea Salted Toffee
Ingredients: Butter, sugar, dark chocolate, sea salt

Oh, those four ingredients are so deceptive.

And I will mildly say that I did find the recipe, the way it was written in the book, a teensy bit deceptive. It sounds SO easy.

It IS simple, I'd counter, but not really easy.

First of all, depending on your experience with melting things in a pot, you might get tripped up on the sheer look  of  the butter and sugar melting together, like I did. I've melted my fair share of butter and sugar in a pot, but I wasn't prepared for the serious clumping that would happen. Instead of a rich puddle of fat and sugar floating in stainless steal, I had a rather forlorn-looking mass of butter and sugar, clumping together like unwilling children on a playground that I had to push around to make do anything.

I pushed...and pushed...and nothing really happened.

The first THREE times I tried to make this (yes, THREE), I freaked when the color began to turn slightly from yellow to almost dark mustard. Terrified of burning the stuff, I quickly poured it onto the parchment thinking it had magically become toffee syrup. Okay, so nothing of the sort happened. Instead I had what looked like really bad sugar cookies lying helplessly on the parchment, staring at the me like, "now what?"

I didn't know, and my daughter was getting hyper from eating scoops of the grainy mass (which still tasted fantastic, don't get me wrong). I was desperate to get the bottom of my problem. What in the WORLD was I doing wrong?

I reread Shauna's instructions. She mentions that the syrup will start to form "around the 8 or 9 minute mark" and that I would be able to tell without a candy thermometer when the right moment would be to pour.

Maybe somebody else would, but I was MISSING IT.

I decided to call up Ashley who has made her fabulous toffee for as long as I can remember. She has four kids so no doubt she was in the middle of some important mother-of-four-kids business at the moment, but I didn't care.

I called. No response

I texted. "We're making toffee and we need help!"

She called within two minutes.

"What's happening?" she asked, with the authority of a general on a nuclear retaliation mission. "Tell me what it's doing. By the way I'm in the drive-thru and have to get the boys lunch. Hold on."

Without missing a beat she came back on and listened to me wail about my three bad batches and how I was on my last batch with all the ingredients I had and how it would NOT turn.

"Toffee is really hard," she acknowledged. "It's taken me 10 years to get it right. Do you have a candy thermometer?"

I didn't and we kept talking and I kept poking at my mass, with my daughter staring on. I kept looking for the color to turn. Nothing.

We kept talking.

"You know, just as easy to undercook it is to overcook it," Ashley went on. "I've burned so many batches. But I've learned that just when it's about to burn, that's when I..."

Suddenly, the mass turned auburn, became syrup, and I smelled the slightest whiff of burnt butter.

"Ashley, Ashley, it turned!" I yelled on the phone. "It smells like it's almost about to burn...here, I'm stirring it, okay, I'm gonna pour...!"

And in the next minute I had my third child. Beautiful amber stuff poured beautifully over my parchment-lined pan, cooling almost instantly and becoming the sweet, sticky, crunchy stuff of my dreams.

"We did it, we did it!" yelled my daughter and I. Ashley was laughing as I thanked her and got off the phone. Lena and I danced around the kitchen, giggly with our success, then we chipped off little bits of the cooled toffee from the spoon and savored the sweet, golden taste.

We dutifully slid the pan in the refrigerator to cool for Shauna's recommended half-an hour before melting the dark chocolate (glass bowl in gently boiling water) and smearing it over the lot of it, sea salt dashed heavily on top.

All that to say, I didn't watch the clock to see when the sugar and butter turned, but I think the most helpful thing for me was noting the physical appearance and the SMELL. It is okay for the mass to be clumpy for a bit, but patience, it will liquify. And when it looks like it's almost too much and juuust about to burn, you've got it.

Also, after my three bad batches I was down to the bottom of the sugar bag and two sticks of butter, so my successful batch was only a half batch to Shauna's recipes--one stick of butter and one cup of sugar. It still made a great deal--enough for dinner with my parents, Ashley and her family, and my husband and I to gnosh at home. I'm not really saying you can have to much toffee, but maybe, if you're eating other good things, a half-batch might be just right. And take a little less time to make.

And also, if you are fortunate to have an Ashley in your life, I'd highly recommend they keep you company--in person or on the phone--while you make it.

The Chapter: "Happy New Year"
Sometimes when I'm rereading these essays to prepare for a blog, I play with the idea, "What's enduring about Bread and Wine?" I love Shauna's body image meditations; I enjoy, though sometimes I get a little itchy about, her food and community reflections (on the days I feel lonely these reflections feel sappy to me), and I do just lover her joie de vivre attitude about cooking-- a thing that so often seems to get piled alongside any other household drudgery, like laundry or cleaning bathroom tile--she makes it so happy.

But I think what I keep coming back to the most is her insistence on taking cooking out of the performance arena and into a relational one. Food is for nourishment for our own bodies and others'; it is not another performance stage, nor competition platform (though of course we turn it into that easily enough). The table is simply for sharing.

God knows I need this message. I tend to be very much a  performer and nervous people pleaser when it comes to relationships. I shy away from awkward, messy situations, which, I don't know if you know, make up most of life, which is to say it's difficult for me to go very deep with other people.

I'm learning through this book that cooking offers me a guide for showing up in the awkward and messy. Food is still a bit of a shield, I realize that, but it's helping me get better at showing up.

When I committed to finishing out this blog project over 14 days (today is Saturday, and I kicked off the challenge on Monday) I knew I was in for messy. My husband was out of town, I have two very busy children, and the week's schedule was going to be a bit of a gamble. We would be seeing a lot of different people while Daddy was gone, and I didn't know how our food situation would work out. But I felt strongly that if I'm to learn to show up in the awkward and messy, it doesn't hurt to have goodies in tow. So I cooked and baked anyway.

I mentioned earlier that the day I made toffee was a hard one. It was. The car battery died, I overslept so I was off my game routine-wise, it was cold and the kids needed extra attention. My parents were coming to dinner.

But I leaned in. I cooked anyway because I really wanted to give my awesome parents an awesome supper. I wanted to connect with them even though the house was messy (and the kitchen was a WRECK by 6pm). I wanted to challenge myself to be in the moment, have fun, do this thing I committed to, and not mind very much if it was awkward and imperfect.

Believe it or not, we had a blast. My parents loved the new flavors I was making. We ate and ate fresh toffee on top of Haagen Daz ice cream and paid no attention to the dishes piled up on the counter.

Later this week I went to see Ashley and her family, which turned out to be a last minute thing because of nap schedules and snow days and single-parent logistics for me. But by Thursday morning I knew I couldn't do dinner with the kids by myself again (the walls were talking to me) so I called Ashley to beg a seat at their table for the night.

Let me just say in the past I'd never have done this--it would have seemed too awkward, too messy and thrown together, or something for me. But the truth was that I needed soul nourishment-- a loud, bumpy family to be around, and honestly my kids did too. Ashley opened the door to our lonely selves, apologizing the entire time for a house cluttered by toys and small children. Of course I did not care. I needed company; not another competition.

I brought all the food I'd been making this week (and of course the toffee) and we created a smorgasbord of goodies to munch on for dinner while we watched kids and talked about our week.

And that to me is what I want cooking to be about. It's what I want my table to be about. I don't have the pieces all together yet, but I do know that simply showing up is the best step.

Shauna says:

In entertaining, as in every area of life, there are experts and rock stars, people who give us complexes and make us afraid, who load us up with expectations and set impossibly high standards so that most of us give up and the rest of us feel terrible about ourselves when we inevitably fall short. But entertainment isn't a sport or a competition. It's an act of love if you let it be. You can twist it and turn it into anything you want--a way to show off your house, a way to compete with your friends, a way to earn love and approval. Or you can decide that every time you open your door it's an act of love, not performance or competition or striving. You can decide that every time people gather around your table, your goal is nourishment, not neurotic proving. You can decide.

This is a good word for us neurotic, competitive people. We can chose to let our home and tables (and really our relationships) be about love and nourishment, no matter how awkward or messy it may be. And I think if we start with love, we cannot be too far wrong, whatever skills or maturity we may need to learn along the way.

Life is difficult, awkward, and messy and yet I believe we can and should cook anyway.

Maybe especially toffee.