Eat IN BED: Toblerone Cookies
Words & Images by Sam Hillman
This recipe might not seem holiday-specific, but it is surprisingly suited to the advent period if you, like me:
- Amass a confusing amount of Toblerone chocolate each Christmas* (often by way of unimaginative colleagues and miscellaneous aunt types)
- Forget to buy people gifts
- Are excruciatingly poor in December
The connection is this: cookies are an easy and dignified way to forward on your stash, under the guise of a thoughtful gesture. As any deft re-gifter knows, you can’t just be re-wrapping things up and passing them on all willy-nilly; the original present should undergo a process of value-adding for the transaction to hold any kind of integrity**. You’ve got to use one gift as the starting point – or in this case, the star ingredient – for a new and (hopefully) improved one. Bake one gift into another. Combine your Toblerone surplus with your moral / fiscal bankruptcy, and make the economy work for you.
You will need:
2 sticks of butter (1 cup), melted and somewhat cooled
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup light brown sugar, packed
3/4 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon cornflour
1 tsp baking powder
2 teaspoons of good vanilla extract
1 teaspoon flaky salt, plus extra to sprinkle
2 eggs
2 large Toblerone bars (I used milk chocolate, but any will work), chopped***
Method:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Combine eggs, butter, vanilla and sugars in a bowl. Then, in another bowl, add the flour, corn flour, salt and baking powder. Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture.
Fold through the chopped Toblerone, saving some to nudge into the top of each cookie, and roll into balls****. Flatten slightly on trays with the back of a spoon (or with your hand or with a fork, I don’t care). Press extra bits of Toblerone on top, and sprinkle with extra flaky salt. Bake for for 10-ish minutes. You want them to look a bit under-baked, because they’ll firm up significantly once out of the oven.
Allow to cool for a moment on the tray, then transfer to a wire rack.
Eat them when warm or wrap them when cold. Ideally, do both.
*This is not a complaint so much as an important cultural observation.
**It is worth mentioning that I am the type of person who gave my mum framed pictures of myself for Christmas (and Mother’s Day and her birthday), every year until my early twenties, so am probably not an ideal north star here.
***You could (and should!) animate these cookies further with a chopped honeycomb bar, such as a Crunchie, or its lesser cousin, the Violet Crumble.
****They could be evenly sized, but consider spicing things up with varying dimensions to watch -drama- unfold at the kids table, Lord of the Flies style.