Chocolate Cookies With Toffee

Back in July, my Sister Bip and I had a long talk about food and as she's doing a lot of cooking these days, she forwarded me a couple of recipes that seemed interesting. However, things were getting a bit busy around the house, so I sort of forgot about them until a couple of weeks ago, when I felt my colleagues needed a little reward for being so helpful to me and I dug one of the recipes out, this (in Swedish) one to be precise.

Ingredients

Makes about 50
200 g soft unsalted butter
2 dl granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
½ dl golden syrup
½ dl cocoa powder
4 dl plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
½ tsp baking powder
1 pinch of salt
about ½ tsp of caramel/dolce de leche

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 175 °C and line a couple of baking tins with baking paper and cut up a couple of more pieces to fit.
2. Whisk together the butter, sugar, vanilla and syrup into a smooth mixture.
3. Mix together all the dry ingredients in a separate bowl first, then stir into the butter mixture.
4. As it gets thick, you'll need to knead it to make sure everything is well incorporated.
5. Now take out walnut sized pieces, roll into balls and place on the baking tins and spare baking paper, making sure they are not too close together.
6. Make a small well in each ball with your thumb and place a small blob of caramel into each.
7. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes, until the cookies have spread out, but watch so the caramel doesn't start burning.
8. Remove from the oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
9. Store in an air-tight container.

Now I made my own caramel from condensed milk in the past, but nowadays it's sold ready made in the shops, so might as well use that. I recommend stirring the caramel through until it's soft, if it has set, don't be tempted to use it if it's set, it won't run out over the cookie during the bake.

Also, the original recipe says to divide up the dough into 24 pieces, but these were way too big, I ended up with huge cookies and as I didn't stir through the caramel, it stayed in a lump in the middle. But they were rather tasty, even if a couple burnt a bit. Very easy to do on the whole, I think, and not too sweet.