Homemade Chocolate Toffee Bars Recipe

Toffee is by far one of the most decadent, marvelous desserts of all time — in our humble opinion. It's crunchy and magically chewy all at once, and it's sweet and nutty and covered in chocolate. It is the perfect dessert. 

However, it has one undesirable attribute that outweighs almost everything else: Toffee can be a real pill to make. Making homemade toffee is not for the faint of heart and is often reserved for more experienced chefs. And that's exactly why we created these chocolate toffee bars!

Chef Tara Rylie of RylieCakes developed this recipe with ease and flavor in mind. Without losing all the sweet, chocolatey, nutty goodness we love, Rylie was able to create a toffee bar that whips up and bakes in under an hour — a baking masterpiece, really. Follow along as you give this recipe a whirl. It might become one of the most used recipes in your kitchen. 

Before starting any recipe, we always recommend you do your mise en place. This means reading through your recipe, ensuring you have all the proper ingredients on hand, and then measuring everything out. In this case, that means gathering some butter, brown sugar, an egg yolk, vanilla, all-purpose flour, salt, semi-sweet chocolate chips, and toasted pecans. 

For this recipe, you should note that it calls for toasted pecans. If you need to toast your pecans, do so before moving forward. Toasting pecans is quite simple. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and place your pecans in a single layer on top of the parchment. Bake at 375 F for five to seven minutes until they're golden brown and have a nutty fragrance. Let your pecans cool before roughly chopping them up.

If you had to toast your pecans, turn your oven down to 350 F. If not, preheat your oven to 350 F. Line a 13x9-inch cake pan with parchment paper; there's no need to coat the pan with cooking spray here.

To easily line your pan, place a rectangular sheet of parchment paper — slightly larger than your pan — over top. Cut the paper diagonally at all four corners, about 1 ½-inches deep. Then press the parchment paper into your pan, folding the triangle tabs at each of the four corners over each other. This is a quick and easy technique that will allow you to easily remove the chocolate toffee bars from your pan when ready.

Next, in the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter, brown sugar, egg yolk, and vanilla extract until fluffy and nearly doubled in size. Then scrape down the sides and bottom of your bowl with a spatula before moving on.

Though creaming butter traditionally means just beating together butter and sugar, the same tricks apply here even though you're adding a few extra ingredients. Make sure your butter is room temperature before you start, around 67 F, and scrape the sides and bottom of your bowl often. This creaming process incorporates air into the batter, which will act as a leavener in this recipe.

After creaming together the wet ingredients, add your flour and salt. Beat everything together on low speed until the flour is fully incorporated. Then turn your mixer up to medium speed and beat for another 30 seconds. Just like that, your dough is ready to rock 'n' roll!

Because this dough is actually quite simple, you could use a hand mixer in place of your stand mixer if you wanted. We wouldn't recommend mixing the dough by hand as creaming butter with a fork and a wooden spoon is absolutely exhausting, but if that's all you've got (or you want a work out), go ahead and give it a whirl.

Place your dough in the prepared pan and press it down into one even layer using your hands. If you prefer not to use your hands, you can always use a small offset spatula or the back of a 1-cup measuring cup. If the dough is a bit sticky, coat your hands or your utensil of choice with cooking spray. Sounds kind of funny, but it doesn't take much effort and will make forming the dough into the pan a breeze.

Bake your toffee bar dough for 20 minutes until golden brown. The dough will still look soft on top, but that's okay!

Immediately after removing your bars from the oven, sprinkle your chocolate chips evenly over the top of the bars and then cover the pan with a half sheet pan or baking sheet longer and wider than the pan. This is just to melt the chocolate. After about five minutes, use a small offset spatula to gently spread the melted chocolate over the bars before adding the pecans. 

Once your chocolate toffee bars cool to room temperature, you can remove them from the pan, but you still should wait until the chocolate has set before cutting them into your desired shape and size. We chose to do some long, skinny bars and some chunky, square bars. 

Store your chocolate toffee bars in an airtight container at room temperature for up to five days, though we doubt they'll last that long!